What to Do with a Horse's Old Shoes
Most owners never think to ask for the shoes back. Once you do, there are more genuinely good options than the usual doorway hook.
Ask before they go in the scrap bucket
The single most useful thing to know is that you have to ask - farriers do not automatically set old shoes aside for an owner, and once they go into the general scrap collection at the end of a visit, there is no getting a specific shoe back. If a particular reshoeing matters to you, mention it before the visit, not after.
This applies especially at the end of a horse's working life or after it has passed away, when the last set of shoes it wore carries far more weight than a shoe from a routine mid-career reset.
The simple, traditional options
Nailing a cleaned shoe above a stable door or a house entrance is still the single most common choice, and it needs almost nothing beyond a wire brush and a couple of nails or screws. It keeps the shoe recognisably itself, wear marks and all.
A step up in effort is mounting it on a small wooden plaque with a brass plate giving the horse's name and dates, which turns a loose object into something that reads clearly as a specific memorial rather than a generic decoration.
Getting someone else to make something of it
Small metalworkers and farriers who take on side commissions can turn a shoe into hooks, bookends, garden ornaments or outdoor drinks holders, keeping the recognisable curved shape rather than melting the material down into something unrecognisable.
The more particular request, and the one that gets asked for most around a horse's retirement or death, is jewellery - having a shoe cut down and made into a pendant or a set of cufflinks, sometimes engraved with a name or a date to mark exactly which horse and which occasion it came from.
If you'd rather buy than commission
Not everyone has a specific shoe to work from, and not every maker takes on one-off custom jobs at short notice. For anyone wanting the same shape and the same meaning without commissioning a specific piece, plenty of jewellers now sell horseshoe pendants ready-made, from a plain first pendant through to personalised and memorial styles.
Either route - your own horse's actual shoe, or a shop-bought equivalent - carries the same folklore behind it. The difference is only whether the piece is tied to one specific animal or not.