HOW TO DEAL WITH INTERNAL INTERNAL PARASITES

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Remember that—by necessity—all the information I'm giving you is very general. There're plenty of good anthelminties that I won't be mentioning ... and new ones are being developed all the time. Your own vet will know which particular worm killers work best for your specific parasites. (After all, the area where you live may have entirely different worms from my home territory.)

Oh, and one last thing. To keep these pages squeezed down to one article (instead of letting them fill out the whole magazine), I've only mentioned a few of the many varieties of parasites. I sincerely hope that any worm whose name I leave out will forgive me. Lord knows, I don't need any worms mad at me.

RUMINANTS

Cattle, sheep, and goats are all ruminants ... that is, animals with four stomachs (their habit of chewing their own cud gives us that word for pondering and repondering a thought, ruminating). These contemplative gnawers can get infested with a page-filling list of internal parasites ... but fortunately, most mod ern broad-spectrum anthelmintics are effective against all sorts of uninvited ruminant "guests".

One nasty disease that immature ruminants sometimes catch is called coccidiosis. The frisky young'uns will probably shake off this single-celled parasite on their own if they get some sunshine and adequate pasture room. But coccidiosis can be fatal. Personally, I wouldn't wait around to see whether the critters drop the bug or the bug drops them. If your newborns get the "runs"—or if your herd has had coccidiosis problems in the past—treat the cudchewing youngsters quickly. In fact, a sensible preventive measure would be to take a fecal sample from any newborn ruminant to your vet for analysis.

Now, I'll tell you a bit more about each of these barnyard beasties.

CATTLE. As the chart shows, all cattle should be wormed three to four times a year, beginning when they are about one month old. Of course, you won't have any trouble medicating the dairy mooers you handle every day ... but it isn't so easy to treat freeroaming beef cattle. Some of those nomadic hoofers get pretty "unhumanized", and trying to hold them still-long enough to, say, squirt a thiabendizole paste on their tongues—is about as easy as shampooing a porcupine. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Randy wrote about proper handling techniques in "Restrain That Beast", MOTHER NO. 52, pages 84-87. / You'll probably have to settle for worming the beef critters whenever you've got them restrained for some other reason (like castration or vaccination).

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