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You'd think that cat or dog Advantage (which is
Imitacloprid and not Ivermectin) would be more appropriate for chickens than a bovine wormer because of body size and skin thickness, although it looks as if it's toxic to Japanese Quail which puts up a red flag for other gallinaceous birds. Unfortunately the Ivermectin artical at Wikipedia stinks , so I'll have to google around and figure out the dog wormer which uses it.
One thing I notice from reading both Wiki articles is that there's a totally ass-backwards risk assessment; Imitacloprid has a relatively small margine between the effective and lethal doses in most animals, whereas Ivermectin is extremely safe except in a cluster of herd dog breeds and some reptiles.
When my brain is not sucking fumes I'll try to chase down a higher level of info, but Wikipedia does hold its attractions when I'm so sleep deprived that I've got trailing rainbows across my visual field for any moving target (which since I don't touch-type is a bit of a nuisance).
There are BYCers all over the planet raving about Eprinex...and have used it with fantastic results, so next time that is the route I go, especially the no egg waite AND ease of application verses the Ivermectin injectible...yuk, or Ivermectin soluble drops in the mouth..what a hassel that is...counting drops in a wiggling hens mouth, especially when you have so many birds !
NOTE: I always do the Wazine treatment first, suppose to relieve a good portion of the parasite load first, then a few days later do the Ivermectrin or Eprinex.
I ordered some eprinex last week. I'm so mad at myself - I threw out 24 bottles of Ivermectin - enough for hundreds of cattle! I used to have llamas and a friend of mine who ran the animal research lab at another pharmaceutical company sent me 2 CASES of 250mL bottles because they were also moving from using animal tissues to using cloned cell-lines and had no use for the Ivermectin anymore. It was a year out from the expire date, but the large animal vet said the stuff does not really expire (I found that to be true of most of the pharmaceutical products we used at work - companies are required to put an exiration date on products, but if the packaging has not been opened, it is not likely to break down without any contaminants growing in it. Some chemicals are light sensitive, so I store everything in the dark. Some may break down at a rate of maybe 10% per year. Antibiotics do break down, so I always get rid of those.)
I need to to the wazine treatment, but my girls are laying so well now! I want to wait until some of my chicks start laying so I won't be without eggs! I wonder when the last time was that the BCM from zgoatlady and RFF's Light Sussex were wormed? Maybe I can still get eggs from 2 birds... How old do the chicks need to be before they can be wormed? My hens are 9-10 months old and I've seen nothing to suggest they may be carrying a heavy load of worms, but I would hate to kill the hens off by using Eprinex first.
