Navicular disease and palmar foot pain cause chronic lameness and suffering in horses that can now be better managed through advanced diagnostic and treatment approaches.
Navicular disease welfare has been transformed by advances in diagnostic imaging that reveal the specific structures causing pain in individual horses, enabling targeted rather than generic treatment. Horses with chronic palmar foot pain experience significant ongoing welfare compromise from lameness that limits movement, affects normal behavior and causes discomfort during rest. The welfare goal is pain management that restores comfortable function, achieved through the combination of appropriate shoeing, medical management and exercise modification. Neurectomy as a salvage procedure raises welfare questions — while eliminating lameness, it removes the protective pain response that warns of tissue damage, and horses must be carefully managed to prevent undetected injury.