Of course, we can always ignore good intentions and debate semantics.
I thought we were debating semantics?
Hah!
Jet Black
[drive by]
Boy, you are a savage human. What - your cat swallowed a spade?
[/drive by]
I don’t have a horse in this race, having never owned a cat
Personally, I’m not declawing my cat until they create QUAD DORRANCE #5X STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS FOR KITTIES. Because I know that little Schnuckums wants the attention that comes with being a QBE.
HA HA HA HA HA!! Now that’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a while! I can just imagining little kitty clicking around the floor on his hooks, just like Pam!
Munch, may I take that as my sig? That’s about the funniest thing I’ve heard in months.
Coldie, the PRINCIPAL was that nice lady with the office at the end of the hallway who tried to convince you to stop yanking down your gym shorts in the middle of kick-ball in the 4th grade.
However, we do admire your PRINCIPLES. 
As for the O.P. I’ve lived with cats for my entire life. Not one of them had their front claws intact after the age of oh, say,…10 weeks? I’m gonna go out on a limb here ( nothing new ) and say that the Original Poster is being a bit of a hypocrite here. Let’s examine the animal, shall we?
Domesticated cats do well in the wild. I have some roaming the neighborhood and while the problem’s not out of control, we know we have a few new ones every year to watch. Cats know the outdoors. They run, leap, hide, fight, kill, eat. They’re not children. They have amazing senses and good muscle tone from the endless hunting.
You bring a small cat indoors and feed it, water it, litterbox it and basically strip it of most of it’s innate skills and needs and you have ALREADY altered the animal’s life drastically. It has no muscle tone. It’s prone to certain ills as a direct result of living indoors. Lies, you say? Try on FUS for size. Feline Urinary Syndrome is a problem faced mostly but not always by domesticated cats.
So to say that we are torturing an otherwise pure wild unaltered animal is false. The cats you love have been bred endlessly to lose most of the feral qualities.
My cats do fine without their front claws. Bogart, our purebred Scottish Fold was- for reasons I cannot fathom- declawed front AND back as a kitten by his owner. He came to use that way. To ME, this is unspeakably wrong. He’s unable to scratch or run properly. We have to tend his fur shedding needs by currying him a lot because he can’t clean his skin or lose decent hair otherwise.
We too have tried scratching posts. We’ve even tried rubbing catnip ON the carpet on the post. Nada, the things just never worked out. And so, our furniture suffered the few times that we DID have cats that had claws front and back. I must admit upset each time they’d come home from the vet with sore paws, but that was short-lived and I can live with the result, and the distress to the pet.
My mother was clawed by Cocoa, our Siamese when I was a 7 year old kid. Cocoa had all 4 claws. He swiped at my mother, opened a varicose vein and caused a trip to the E.R. Sorry, but whether the O.P.'er wishes to admit it or not, ALL of us keep the pets at our convenience. If I can save a bad wound- or torn vein- by delcawing a cat, then so be it.
Cartooniverse
Thank God- I started thinking that I was in some bizzaro world where only the “cons” arguments were showing up, and the post after post that said “Hello! It’s done with lasers!” were just a figment of my imagination.
Talk about getting rid of ignorance- good job. I was unaware of the laser procedure and will recommend it for a friend of mine who has been debating.
Zette
::Next poster::
Yeah?? Well declawing is cruel and they cut their little kitty paws right off and leave bloody stumps! Yeah!!! Bastards!::
(just giving a little head start)
Smart ass.
I do believe there is another argument to be made here.
While I understand some posters reluctance to declaw a cat so the cat can more easily live in harmony with furniture or whatever, I think it’s a little late for us to be objecting to “shaping cats to our will”. Humans, as a species, have pretty much created the house cat through breeding and domestication (upon reading the SD Staff article on the subject, perhaps this argument applies more to dogs but I think the priciple is still there).
Hell Yes!!!
Cats will be begging to get their entire paws chopped off so they can sport the latest DORRANCE #5X STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS.
That’s rich Munch. 
You can even engrave it over the mantle of the Fortress of Solidude if you like. In fact, I insist that you do so. For kitty’s sake.
I hesitate to embroil myself in this debate since it’s so emotionally charged on both sides and I MUST be loved by all. However, one thing has me stumped (no pun intended). I keep seeing people referring to interfering with the cat’s ability to groom itself as one of the evil aftereffects of declawing, and I must say: huh?
Are you people (those of you who are espousing this viewpoint) under the impression that cats somehow comb their fur with their claws? The closest thing I can think of to this that I’ve ever observed is a cat’s tendency to use its paws to wash behind its ears - and cats do that with velveted paws, not with claws extended. They groom themselves by using their tongues, not their claws, people.
My two cat ladies were declawed using the new laser procedure and also had a painkiller-patch that kept them from feeling any discomfort at all as far as I could see… and I was watching them for signs of discomfort because I was outvoted on the declawing subject by Mrs. Chef and our vet. (that is to say, Mrs. Chef wanted them declawed and the vet calmed my fears about it.) I had to admit that they were right… our ladies seem completely unaware that their claws are gone, still “scratch” the furniture, haven’t started biting more or acting more aggressive - none of it. All those dire consequences that the declawing opponents sling around have turned out, in our case, to be no-shows. It’s been a complete non-issue for us.
pardon my ignorace, but is possible to declaw a dog?
That way Fido wont dig up the back yard.
I tried to find some info on the 'net, but all I could find was stuff about debarking.
Just wondering.
Just don’t scratch it into the door frame with your claws, or we might have to cruelly rip your nails off your fingertips or amputate your hands at the wrist for the offense.
Here’s what I found:
From this site about declawing rabbits:
So dogs and rabbits would have problems walking after a declaw while cats do not.
Also, from the same site:
Seems that the procedure exists but is not practiced unless there is infection or some other compelling reason.
Other than that, discussion on a few message baords leads me to believe that while sometime their dewclaws are removed, when a question is asked about declawing a dog, it’s usually responded to with: “What, are you crazy?”.
One site has a story of a dog who was declawed and suffered many ill effects.
Let me get this straight-- you’re about to introduce a new argument to your side and you want us to research it for you?
Sorry, Munch, but this one takes the cake. Now that’s funny, gadgetgirl!!
Chef Troy- I wondered about that too. What do claws have to do with grooming… especially the front claws? It doesn’t make any sense. They don’t have anything to do with it.
In a way, I don’t think some of these arguments are meant to make any sense… otherwise they would. I think they’re simply put out there in the futile attempt, and hope, that if they say enough of them, they might make one of them stick and get a desired knee-jerk reaction from the reader.
Kind of a third-grade way to argue a point, if you ask me-- overwhelm those who can’t think for a second and hope they respond, ‘Duhh, errmmmm, oh. They can’t groom without claws? Well that’s just awful!! I’m going to do something about that!!’.
It’d be nice if those that were making those arguments would attempt to even respond to those questioning them, or back them up. Alas, I don’t see that happening anytime soon here.
I have, but found Inigo still managed to do some damage to my new sofa while wearing 'em. Inigo had them for about a year before I gave up–but I have some left over and may give it another shot.
What currently works best is ____________ (forgot the brand name), which is basically large strips of double sided sticky tape. Inigo HATES that stuff–he put his paws on it ONCE and completely freaked. I swear, it’s better than water. In fact, yesterday I was holding him over the back of the sofa (where some strips are), and he was reacting like I was holding him over a swimming pool. :::::scramble scramble scramble:::::: NO! ANYTHING BUT THAT! NO NO NO NO NO!
This is all well and good, except he has continued to ignore the 4 scratching posts. Now the carpet and the entry rugs are his favorite. sigh
This is a point that I think needs to be made here; laser declawing seems to differ from traditional declawing only in that a laser beam is used rather than a scalpel. In other words, the third phalanx of the cat’s paw (with claw attached) is still removed.
From this site:
“The laser beam…will cut through skin and tendons along with ligaments in between the digits. Bone is not cut during the procedure. The nail, with its attached bone (called phalanx 3), is removed.”
Merriam Webster definition of phalanx: “one of the digital bones of the hand or foot of a vertebrate”
I had to revisit this topic because I’d read gadgetgirl’s original off-the-cuff comment this morning, had no time to post before work, and was irritated by it most of my morning. So here I am.
Unfortunately, the bulk of what I was going to say was what Zette said. But of course, I have more.
[li]Clipping feathers is no more cruel that cutting hair or (ahem) trimming claws. It grows back. It is painless. It causes no more trauma than the restraint itself–the bird may not like it, but neither does Inigo. They both get over it quickly.[/li]
[li]Clipping feathers is a very RESPONSIBLE thing for a bird-owner to do. If someone had bothered to clip Lucky’s feathers, I wouldn’t have a bird to begin with. But Lucky, sick, pecked by native species, and malnourished, had the good fortune to fly into this animal lover/sucker’s classroom. One of the first things I did was clip his wings. (My students freaked–until I explained that it’s just trimming feathers, like cutting hair, and will grow back.)[/li]
[li]Escaped non-native species, bird or otherwise, can cause SEVERE native ecological disruptions. Here in southern California, there are HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of escaped cockatiels, budgies (such as Lucky), green Amazons, conures, etc. flying around. Pasadena in particular is known for them–and the damage they do to native flora (and fauna). It relates back to being responsible for your pet. If you want a pet that flies, trim the frickin’ flight feathers to keep them from damaging the environment, not just PROPERTY.[/li]
Grr. <deep breath> Okay, now that that’s off my chest, a final comment: Such an asinine comment does not help your position on the original topic. It does not reflect well on your basis of opinion, and this casts a skeptical light on your other argument–no matter how coherent it may or may not have been.