You can avoid the horse paste if you'd like. It's a free country. Quercetin & zinc also work too and thats what we use. There is so many ways to beat this now that the FDA is probably up into the wee hours of the morning trying to keep up with all of this. I say that alone is a good thing. But yea, seeing the inactive ingredients say "hydrogenated castor bean oil" made me not take it and I handed it to the lady down the road who owns horses.