Fake Footprint Fakeout

[Another Mr White]

I'll keep this simple. I have a party who include a kobold in their number. Their idea is to buy him Fake Footprint Shoes (Ultimate Equipment pg. 56) that are designed to lay down kobold tracks. As said kobold has no ranks in survival (and a wisdom pentalty), the resultant DC to identify the tracks as fake is going to be easy for even a novice tracker.

The exact wording of that mechanic is thus.
"When walking with these shoes, you may make a Survival check; the check result is the Survival DC for anyone trying to determine whether the tracks are what they appear to be."

Now I'm personally leaning towards letting it work, because I like it when my players use a little ingenuity, but is that all that that specific check will do? Because it also seems that 5gp is a small price to pay in order to ensure that no tracker can ever be sure what you are when they are tracking you.

[Emo Duck]

It seems to have the required verisimilitude to me. The shoes don't prevent actually tracking the creature (as I understand it), but it seems to me that anyone wearing weirdly designed shoes could obfuscate their normal footprints.

If a humanoid were to wear fake elephant shoes, a tracker would likely be able to tell from the depth of the prints, the spacing between them, etc. that he's not dealing with an actual elephant, but since the tracks are still elephant-shaped, it might well be impossible to tell whether they were made by an orc, an elf or a dwarf.