Question about tapeworms treatment and mine and my chickens' future...

[TheBantamRooTwo]

Hello all!

I have a question that needs to be answered.

So I have a flock of 15 chickens at my house. Some of them (if not all of them) have tapeworms. We have treated them with SafeGuard Liquid Goat Dewormer and Diatomaceous Earth for the tapes and Corid for what we think is coccidiosis in a Jersey Giant hen.

This year I am graduating from high school (yay!) and going off to college. This is where my question is: What should I do about the tapeworms??

I have read that you can kill the tapeworms with products with praziquantel (like Equimax Horse Paste or Zimectrin Gold), but you also have to repeatedly and aggressively treat the area they live in because of the eggs and proglottids from the worms produce. I am going off to college this fall and I feel really bad about forcing my parents and younger brother to take care of the chickens because I am not there. I really feel that when I am gone, I won't be around enough to help with this, and if the treatment doesn't work, we will be back to square one.

I have thought about this a lot, and I think that what I am going to do is still regularly treat the chickens for the tapes and other worms in general, (this might sound cruel...) but not completely/effectively treat and kill the worms because of how aggressive the treatment is and how much it could potentially cost.

Can someone please advise and give me peace of mind??

 

[dawg53]

Safeguard liquid goat wormer is more expensive than Equimax equine paste. Safeguard wont treat tapeworms and DE is a waste of money.
Give your tapeworm infected birds Equimax and it's bye bye tapeworms. You might even see tapeworm bits and pieces or even the whole tapeworm excreted from one of your birds if your lucky.
I've dealt with tapeworms a few times.
Here's where you can get the Equimax:
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/search/equimax wormer?

 

[Eggcessive]

I would not get too bent out of shape about this. The dosage is so small that one tube would probably treat your 5 chickens twice. If you notice a problem with one of the above hosts, it would be helpful to remove them, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to treat them and go from there.

 

[Eggcessive]

Do you have any pictures of the droppings with tapeworms? Were there any moving proglottids in the droppings? Have you had a fecal float done on some fresh droppings? Not all of your chickens would necessarily have tapeworms if one has them. If you see the tapeworm segments in one’s poop, I would treat just that bird. They have to eat one of the intermediate hosts such as earthworms, snails, slugs, beetles, flies, fleas, or grasshoppers, to get tapeworms. Mice and moles also contain them, and chickens have been known to eat them. Praziquantel is effective. Equimax dosage is 0.03 ml per pound of weight given orally once and again in 14 days is how to treat them. Here is a good video of tapeworms in droppings:

 

[Kiki]

What do you think did? I am stumped.

It is possible that the bird has an extreme overload of worms in its body and the worms have no more room to thrive inside so it was expelled.

 

[Kiki]

The above reason is usually the reason one will see worms to begin with.

 

[dawg53]

If one bird has tapes, you have to treat them all. It would very unlikely when you have one bird that has them, not to have all of them have them. There is no down side to treating all of them. If you miss one, then you are imply speeding the re-infection of the others.

No, that isnt true. For roundworms yes, but not tapeworms.
Chickens get tapeworms from eating an insect which is the host for the tapeworm. Not all insects are tapeworm infected. Not all chickens will be tapeworm infected. It's called the Indirect lifecycle of tapeworms. For roundworms it's called the Direct lifecycle.

 

[samanthaoverton]

I guess that's possible but I don't think that is what happened because the bird was expelled from came from my 4-H leader and she said her birds don't have tapes (they DID have mites and lice but that's a different story). I hope that doesn't sound rude... I'm not trying to be rude.

It's not rude to state the truth..

 

[TheBantamRooTwo]

Do you have any pictures of the droppings with tapeworms? Were there any moving proglottids in the droppings? Have you had a fecal float done on some fresh droppings? Not all of your chickens would necessarily have tapeworms if one has them. If you see the tapeworm segments in one’s poop, I would treat just that bird. They have to eat one of the intermediate hosts such as earthworms, snails, slugs, beetles, flies, fleas, or grasshoppers, to get tapeworms. Mice and moles also contain them, and chickens have been known to eat them. Praziquantel is effective. Equimax dosage is 0.03 ml per pound of weight given orally once and again in 14 days is how to treat them. Here is a good video of tapeworms in droppings:

I do not have any pictures at the moment (but I can go take some if you want). I don't mean for this to sound rude (I really hope it doesn't) but I know they are tapeworms. They have had them since December (that was the first time I noticed them and I had a complete mental breakdown, but I'm better now). I see proglottids all the time (both moving and not moving). There are multiple chickens with tapeworms. I do not know how many exactly, but I think it's more than 5.

As for the praziquantel, I just don't know if I should even try to treat them because it is really hard to find the medication and the cost of it compared to how much we would have to use is a lot. I think you also have to treat the ground they live on. Does that make sense?

 

[Kiki]