While the shoes offer promise for laminitis-prone ponies, the best weapon against the disease remains prevention, including weight loss in overweight equids. | Photo: iStock

If you’ve ever seen a laminitic pony trying to hobble across a paddock, you know how sore those tiny feet can get. A lightweight therapeutic shoe, however, could give these little animals some pain relief, say Dutch and Belgian researchers.

A special, custom-fitted thermoplastic glue-on shoe, designed to support the frog, made study ponies more comfortable within three days, said Janneke Sleutjens, DVM, PhD, ambulatory equine veterinarian in the Utrecht University Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, in the Netherlands.

In their study, Sleutjens and her fellow researchers measured various foot-related forces in healthy and sound Shetland ponies (half obese and half a healthy weight) as they walked with and without thermoplastic shoes (thermoplastic materials become plastic on heating, harden on cooling, and are able to repeat these processes). The moldable shoes had a heart-bar design and rolled toe, intended to relieve laminitic pain in affected horses. They were lightweight, custom-sized and fit to each horse, and glued to the hooves