Explain how spaying and neutering are for the animal’s own welfare? I would posit that these procedures are done more for the benefits of people, not cats: reduces spraying in males, keeps a household from having to deal with trying to give away a litter of kittens, keeps a male cat from knocking up some female stray in the neighborhood thus increasing the general stray problem so that people don’t have to have the guilt of all the stray kittens that are put down each year hanging over their heads.
The only “welfare of the cat” reason I can honestly see is that the females no longer go through the every few weeks of being hot and bothered, rolling around on the floor and caterwauling the feline equivilent of “WHO DO I HAVE TO SLEEP WITH TO GET A GOOD F*** AROUND HERE?” Now with ferrets, it’s a different story: females, if not bred upon the onset of estrus, DIE. Unlike cats, having a female ferret that you don’t intend to breed spayed is a welfare of the animal issue.
Most of the mean cats I’ve seen claw you and hold so they can get a good bite on you. Biting and clawing are hardly mutually exclusive. They are more like peanut butter and chocolate - to a mean cat.
To be totally effective you have to stalk your cat where it claws. This may entail closing off portions of the house, whatever. Water guns, scratching posts, and cat nip all help. Carrot, meet stick.
Sometimes, the initial damage is all it takes to make you stroke out anyway. Once furniture has gashes, well, it has gashes. Sometimes things can be recovered. This can be a blessing in disguise, in the case of fugly hand-me-downs. Or, in the case of our dining room chairs, the new ones are a lot nicer than the ones that came with the set.
My advice: get cheap furniture or don’t let your cat into the rooms with the expensive stuff. Or, combine the two.
My German Shepherd ate the carpet in two rooms. Solution: tile.
I’m pretty sure most owners don’t do it for this particular reason, but the risk of some diseases is drastically reduced by spaying/neutering. Mammary, uterine, and prostate cancers and venereal diseases are some that quickly come to mind. Castrated animals also tend to roam the streets a lot less, which keeps their cute little heads out from under the wheels of SUVs.
What You with the Face said on the animal’s welfare.
You can also consider the welfare of the 5 million animals that are euthanized in US shelters every year because there are so many more cats and dogs than there are homes for them; were we to spay and neuter more cats and dogs, we’d see a corresponding drop in the number of euthanized animals.
Actually, I posted that with the rolleyes because I figured that would be the anti- declawing sentiment on the question when RickJay asked it. And I was apparently correct because:
I think declawing is not maiming. Do declawed cats continue to have pain? Can they still lead a healthy, happy life?
It’s not so much the animal’s own welfare as the welfare of its potential kittens. Point being there are more cats than there are homes for them already, we don’t need to increase the homeless, euthanasia-candidate cat population. Still a human issue, IMO, but a legitimate one.
My half-cat, who I really should try to get spayed, is only eighteen months old and is pregnant for the third time. She is half-feral, and I only see her a few nights of the week, and she is only tame with me and freaks out at other people, hence the difficulty in getting her to a vet in daylight hours.
However although she seems to revel in her pregnancies, I can’t help feeling that gestation after gestation is just going to wear her little feline body out. Plus - as others have mentioned - the huge problem of unwanted kittens here. (Sadly, she has vanished for weeks each time after having her kittens, and never shown them to me. She just turns up again eventually for food, you can tell she is still breastfeeding them, but they never appear and I have no clue what happens to them once they are weaned. It is a maze of rat-run alleyways around here.
Back to clawing: her claws are sharp and nasty. When she crawls onto my lap and starts her “love-pawing” it hurts like hell, because they dig in. She also started scritching up my brand new tribal Persian rug the first day she saw it. But it’s still not reasons to maim her (even if she was a 100% indoor cat, which of course she’s not). Her claws are part of her. I could always hang the rug on the wall. Restrict her to rooms where there weren’t scratchable furniture. Sew protection patches of hessian on lower parts of furniture. Put a towel or something over my lap when she sits on it.
Because ultimately, I love and respect my half-cat more than any inanimate object. I would always put her health and wellbeing and physical wholeness first.
Neither of those are criteria for a maiming. A person whose arm I put through a wood chipper would still be able to live a healthy happy life without pain. It is still a maiming.
Well, you see…MOST male cats will do things like get aggressive & spray- thus, in general, spaying is a good thing to do. And, in many instances- the cat will not stop the spraying behaviour once started, even if neutered later. And- these behaviours are very hard to train the cat out of. Sure, I wish we didn’t have to fix my male cat- but it was for the best.
However- MOST cats will not be destructive in their usage of claws, and MOST cats who do use their claws on the furniture can be easily trained to use scratching posts & the like. Thus, declawing is not usually needed. I would consider it- but only as a last resort. Thank God we have never needed to do so.
Note that declawing also seems to be far more traumatic to a cat that neutering, and has a higher risk of side effect.
So, yes, I’d say that declawing is not nessesarily “wrong & evil”, but it is something that should not be done routinely, but only in a few special cases. However, too many families just do it without considering more humane alternatives.
See, this confuses me. Usually, the people I hear up in arms about the cruelty of declawing also tell me that allowing cats outside means one should not be allowed to have them. After all, it’s dangerous out there. Which makes me wonder then, what I am to do with my cat, since no matter where she is someone will insist it is cruel to have her there.
Everyone who has their cat declawed should have the tips of each finger removed to the first knuckle so they’ll know what it’s like; under anesthesia, of course, humanely.
She’s not quite mine. She only occupies half the space in my life (though a full quota of love) that a normal pet cat would. Because she’s feral, so is only there around half of the time.
I’ll buy the first one, but also would wager that preventing said diseases is not the first benefit that most cat owners would list when asked why they got their cat neutered/spayed.
The second one, is a bit of a stretch. Would other ‘maiming’ practices, such as quaduruple amputation, become acceptable because they also prevent the cat from roaming the streets? It’s for the welfare of the animal, you know.
My ex-roomate’s siamese became dramatically overweight overweight after he had her spayed. It’s my understanding that this is fairly common. How much of a negative effect on quality of life do those extra pounds have? Do the health benefits of disease prevention outweigh the health risks of obesity?
Also, surely there’s extra effort during even mild to moderate exercise, such as walking across the room and jumping, but it’s hard to tell just how much of an impact this has on the cat’s life. I mean, after all, you can’t tell if a cat is laying there thinking “Damn, whenever I walk across the room I get tired hauling around this lardbutt of mine” or if they’re just laying there because they’re well… a cat, and that’s what cats do.
Now getting back to the original topic, just how badly does declawing affect the quality of life of an indoor cat?
You’d better have one hell of a sob story if you want to justify declawing your cat. Doing it because it’s easier than training or because of some mistaken belief that the cat’s quality of life is not effected is selfish and stupid.
