Why do horses need to be dewormed?
Horses have been hosts to worms for ever. Wild horses living on huge tracts of land are less susceptible to heavy worm infections simply because they are so spread out and constantly on the move. Contrast this with our domesticated horses which tend to live on small tracts of land in more concentrated groups where they can easily come in contact with manure from their herd mates. In the basic life cycle of horse worms, the adult worms live and mate inside the horses’s intestine. The females lay eggs which pass out in the manure. The eggs are then consumed by a horse, hatch inside the horse and may undergo several life stages to eventually become adults in the intestine. Some types of worms have a life cycle where the eggs hatch in the environment to turn into free- living larvae that are eaten by the horse to then turn into adults inside the horse. Tapeworm eggs are passed in the manure and then eaten by a free-living pasture mite which the horse eats during grazing, and once inside th
