Hey guys, it’s Krista with SaddleBox and for today’s video, I’m going to be giving you some tips for administering oral medication to your horses.
So ideally you would have wanted to practice with your syringe, and these go in the mouth. So maybe you’re administering banamine, omeprazole, whatever it might be that you need to administer in the mouth. So like I said, ideally you would have wanted to practice with your horse, so you want to do a lot of rubbing.
And by the way, this is Quest, and as you can see, she hates oral medication, so this is why I’m using her. So you want to practice all of this, as you can see, we probably need to practice it more. Another thing I like to get them very, very used to is having my finger in their mouth, so I’ll just stick my finger in there, and then let it out.
Stick my finger in there, let it out, just like that. Another thing I’ve seen people do, I haven’t actually tried this one, is they will put apple sauce in here and give it to them like a treat so they anticipate that this is going to be something good, so when you do actually have to give them something that doesn’t taste so good, they’re not as scared of it.
So I’m just going to use this for practice, but we get into situations where maybe we haven’t had the chance to work with our horse, or they’re just not good with this in general, so they have colic or something and all you have is oral banamine, I’m going to give you some tips for kind of doing it and getting the job done and getting it done fast.
So, like I said, say she’s in a situation where I only have oral medication to give her and I can’t get ahold of my vet. So this is a few tips for just kind of getting it done. The first thing I do, I don’t want to tie them up when I do this, you can really get yourself or your horse injured because you’re going to make them feel trapped, they’re going to step back, it’s just going to be a bad situation.
So I have her in this little stall here, it’s just going to keep her safe and me safe. Even better if you have a stock or a set of stocks, that will be even better, but for now, not everybody has that, so I’m just using a stall here. That way, if she were to rear up or strike or anything, she’s going to hit the fence and not me.
Okay, so I’ve got her in here, and I’ll just do a very quick overview of the stuff I should have done in the past. So I’ll just rub this on her, get her used to that, put my finger in her mouth, take it out, good girl. And if you’re having trouble at this stage, you really want to practice it for 10 minutes just to kind of get them used to it so they’re not really expecting it, so you can just get it over with.
And you want to get it in far because you don’t want medicine to go everywhere and for it to get wasted. So, again, you want to make sure everything is ready, when you do get in there, you want to rub, get them when they’re not expecting it, push, over. And that’s really good for this horse, because usually she’s very bad.
Okay, another thing is oftentimes, when you get this in here, they’ll go backwards or try to put their head up. It’s important to try to stay with them as best you can while you’re administering medicine, that way, again, you won’t waste medicine and you won’t get it everywhere.
And then after you get it in their mouth, if you were successful at doing that, so I get this here, it goes in, I get the medication in, it’s best to kind of hold their head up like this if you can so that they swallow and don’t spit it out, if that makes sense. And always remember to consult your veterinarian on all of these kinds of things. If you’re really struggling, you’re stressing out, you’re stressing your horse out, call your vet, call a vet.
Okay y’all, that’s it for this one, I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye guys!