Preventing Duplicate Posts

I’m looking for a way to prevent duplicate posting when using a top posts gallery such as featplug (https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/featplug/).

Here’s how my homepage is setup. At the top of my homepage I’ll have the featplug plugin scrolling through the latest 5 or so posts. Directly beneath that, each category (horses, cows, sheep etc.) is displaying excerpts and a thumbnail of the 3 latest posts within that category.

The problem is, that there will be posts being displayed twice (in featplug and again in its category display below that) which looks kind of unprofessional.

If anyone can help with a way that would prevent the post from being displayed in the category excerpt portion while it’s being featured in the featplug portion, and when it gets bumped out of featplug by newer posts to revert back to its category display, it would be much appreciated.

I hope I explained my issue well, if not, let me know what you don’t understand so that I can better explain.

Thanks.