Feed-room note

Paste for the big eaters: Panacur on the equine shelf

Horses do not get packets. Their Panacur is a 10% fenbendazole paste — 100 mg per gram — in a syringe with a dial-a-dose plunger, flavored apple-cinnamon because a horse that fights the tube teaches everyone in the barn to dread worming day. One syringe covers 1,100 pounds of horse at the standard 5 mg/kg dose.

Set the dial to the horse's weight, slide the nozzle in at the corner of the mouth where there are no teeth, aim back over the tongue, and push. Hold the head level for a few seconds so the mouthful goes down instead of onto your boots. An empty mouth beforehand helps — a horse mid-hay will pocket the paste in the wad and spit both.

The single syringe and the three-pack on this shelf are the routine tools: spring and fall rotations, new arrivals, and the fecal-egg-count-directed dosing most barns now run with their vet. The strongyles, pinworms and ascarids on the label fall to the ordinary dose.

The Powerpac is the specialist. Five days of paste at double strength is the labeled protocol for encysted small strongyle larvae — the ones bricked into the gut wall, immune to single-day wormers, that emerge in late winter as colic risk. It is a vet-directed course; run it on their calendar, not the catalog's.

Storage is unglamorous and matters: capped, room temperature, out of the tack trunk that freezes in January and cooks in July. A part-used syringe keeps for the next rotation as long as the paste still presses out smooth.