Recipe for homemade worm preventative

[Babsboys5]

Does anyone have a recipe for a mixture of stuff to prevent worms/parasites.
I know you can buy some but its quite expensive.
Thanks!!

 

[FrostRanger]

Nothing that's going to be very effective. Your best bet is to go with safeguard liquid goat wormer

 

[Perris]

Does anyone have a recipe for a mixture of stuff to prevent worms/parasites.
I know you can buy some but its quite expensive.
Thanks!!

Table 4 in this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9924796/ lists plants with proven anthelmintic properties.

Most proprietary wormers and insecticides kill a huge number of non-target species too, and thus are very bad for the environment, doing far more harm than good. So that's another reason, besides the cost issue, to prepare your own, targeted on the problem you're dealing with, from plants that grow where you are. Good luck!

 

[LaFleche]

Table 4 in this https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9924796/ lists plants with proven anthelmintic properties.

Most proprietary wormers and insecticides kill a huge number of non-target species too, and thus are very bad for the environment, doing far more harm than good. So that's another reason, besides the cost issue, to prepare your own, targeted on the problem you're dealing with, from plants that grow where you are. Good luck!

Thank you for this very interesting link @Perris

The problem I see for us pharmaceutical laypeople is not only how and where to purchase the drugs but also how to determine the effective dose/mixture while at the same time making sure not to harm or even kill our birds with the well meant but possibly lethal home mixed medication.

Another thing to consider would be if and which and for how long any of the given drugs will be found in the eggs or meat of our birds. And what effect/harm they may have for us human consumers ( i.e allergic reactions?).

 

[Perris]

Thank you for this very interesting link @Perris

The problem I see for us pharmaceutical laypeople is not only how and where to purchase the drugs but also how to determine the effective dose/mixture while at the same time making sure not to harm or even kill our birds with the well meant but possibly lethal home mixed medication.

Another thing to consider would be if and which and for how long any of the given drugs will be found in the eggs or meat of our birds. And what effect/harm they may have for us human consumers ( i.e allergic reactions?).

Good points. One advantage with natural remedies is that they are not concentrated, and therefore much more forgiving of mistakes; proprietary pharmaceuticals are almost always purified extracts, so much, much more potent.

Herbal handbooks are based on literally thousands of years of experience - most European ones can be traced back to Dioscorides, 1st century AD Greek doctor with the Roman legions, and he was synthesizing multiple prior sources. Clay tablets from about 3000 BC mention opium and myrrh as remedies. Chinese traditional medicine has a similarly long history, the 1st written record dating to about 2,800 BC. And the Ebers papyrus demonstrates Egyptian knowledge of some 850 useful plants about 1,500 BC.

Which is not to say that all such remedies are efficacious; patently some are not. But equally patently, some are. "More than a third of modern pharmaceuticals still come directly or indirectly from species in nature" Svedrup-Thygeson Tapestries of Nature 2021 chapter 4.

Meanwhile resistant bacteria kill over 30,000 people per annum in Europe alone thanks to decades of indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Some expect deaths from resistant bacteria to outnumber deaths from cancer by 2050 (idem). So popping pills can be lethal too, indirectly if not directly.

I've found chickens are amazingly resilient if their metabolisms are not assaulted with drugs. There are lots of posts on BYC where people treated 'properly' and the bird still died, and thereafter it seems to be assumed that it was the initial problem, and not the treatment, that killed it. I have come to the view that most interventions I made in my early chicken keeping years made things worse. So nowadays I intervene only very, very rarely, and prefer to err on the side of doing too little too late than going in too hard and too fast. Maybe, to bring the discussion back full circle, that's because I got the drug - home made or proprietary, your point applies to either - or the dosing wrong. Or maybe messing with the chicken's immune system, either directly with drugs targeting the supposed problem, or indirectly by e.g. forcing it to consume a particular fluid or foodstuff, was what really made them worse, not better. It's very hard to know. At the end of the day, we all just do our best I think.