worm medicine , best one to mix with water

[hunter58]

OK I'm new here and with chickens, so here goes.
I've been reading about worm medicines, also i believe there are several types of worms that could hurt my chickens.

What would be the best kind that i can mix with water. How long and often to use it ? I don't feel comfortable giving them a shot or putting a pill down their throat.

thanks hunter

 

[dmdhart]

I know that you can give them piprizine (sp) It is fairly safe and you can find it at the grocery store usually in cat or kitten wormer. Look in the ingedients. You can use fenbendazole, found in horse wormer. This get gape worm. It does not mix well in water, but will mix in yougurt and canned dog food quite nicely. Depending on how many chickens you have, I just squirt about an inch or two of the paste into the dog food and mix it up. Both of these things chickens like. Hope that helps

 

[threehorses]

This is what I recommend:

I don't recommend you buy cat/dog wormer as you can't tell how to dose it without a math degree and it's meant to be given on food.

Buy Wazine 17 (piperazine 17%) which is via water. Give taht one day as labeled. Withhold all eggs and meat for 14 days. Then give the ivermectin that you can give in the water.

On the day of worming and one week afterwards, give yogurt every other day for a week to replace bacteria lost during stress.

The reasoning is this:

One worming with wazine, which only kills roundworms, gets you started by killing most but not all of the roundworms. Since you haven't had a fecal egg count done by a vet, you don't know if your birds are wormy or not. If you kill ALL the roundworms and the bird has a lot, you can make it go into anaphylactic shock or die from clogging. I've had friends who had this happen. So you worm gently and rather ineffectively first - on purpose.

Then you worm the following time and every time thereafter with ivermectin. Ivermectin is very safe for the bird but deadly for worms. It will kill (nearly) everything at once. So you don't want the bird to be fully infested the first time. Thus the wazine starter. The ivermectin will kill everything else (except tapes and protazoa) including mites and lice that take blood.

Then worm with ivermemectin twice a year thereafter.

You can use DE in the bedding in between to help prevent the hosts of worms and help with lice/mite issues.

 

[Pine Grove]

Is Ivermectin really effective for cecal or gizzard worms? Levamisol would be my choice as a water soluble..IMO Piperazine and Ivermectin has seen their better days as an effective round wormer..After wroming with everything from Red devil Lye to the old Salsbury Wormall Tablets I'm convinced that Valbazen is the most effective wormer that can be given to poultry, It even has anti-protozoa properties against Blackhead and coccidiosis...

 

[Brindlebtch]

What kind of Ivermectin do you add to water? How much per gallon? I'm new to chickens and haven't heard of this.

 

[kittycast]

When you say withold all meet and eggs does that mean to not give the chickens meet and eggs or do not eat their eggs and meat? I hope this is not to stupid a question.

 

[speckledhen]

Do not eat their meat or eggs after worming, Kittycast. I have to agree with William on this one. If you're going to worm them with chemicals, might as well use a broad spectrum wormer with anti-protozoan properties and get everything at once. You have to toss the eggs for a bit anyway.

 

[hunter58]

Thanks for all the good info