Imgur is notorious for things like this. Also docking tails or cropping ears for dogs. A single picture of a beautiful dog can bring out dozens of people screaming for your blood.
After the declawing, make sure to get the cat circumcised as well. Then probably your parents should get an assault rifle, just in case any crazed animal lovers get upset. Don’t bother to get the cat fixed though - you can always get a cat abortion later. Probably you should make the cat into a vegetarian, as this will probably be good for it.
I think if you were to ask the kitties if they’d prefer a short hard-scrabble life as feral cats or always in rescues and shelters with their claws, or a long pampered life as a family’s kitty-kat without them, they’d give up their claws in a heartbeat.
There is longer, then there is happier. Would one rather have a happy but shorter life or a longer but not as happy life?
As for cats I’ve had two types, indoor only, and what I call I/O cats (Indoor/Outdoor), never had a outdoor only cat, Don’t think I will.
The indoor only cats was from my ex, she believed in indoor only. I showed them (3) the outdoors. For two of them their eyes were opened and there was no going back, they loved it. For the other she was afraid and returned to a indoor only life by choice.
My current cat has a RFID cat door so she can come and go as she wants, letting only her enter, and she wouldn’t have it any other way (she was very upset when I originally set the door to incoming only which required me to let her out, and she made that very clear, she is very good at that).
I’m glad you explained that. Is that like when Rachael Ray says: ‘EVOO, Extra Virgin Olive Oil’.
I guess it could have meant inboard/outboard.
Just disseminating information. It was not a judgment. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not keep cats exclusively indoors, such as pest control, as our friend Omar Little uses his.
Our own recently departed Reuben was indoor/outdoor for all but the last 5 years of his life; after he badly injured a paw in some kind of scrape out in the neighborhood we kept him indoors, not only because of his advancing age, but because we couldn’t afford to keep taking him to the vet to get patched up. But he was a pet, and we let him out because he loved it and we were confident he was smart enough and experienced enough outdoors to take care of himself out there. Our other cat, Whitney, is dumb as a rock and although picked up off the street as a stray/feral kitten, I’m certain she’d be run over inside of 15 minutes if we were to let her free outside.
*A large gray troll is sitting casually on the ground. As you approach, he holds up a cardboard sign: “Will declaw and/or circumcise retarded cats for food.” *
-Troll Minion, Kingdom of Loathing
This seems to me like the same sort of anthropomorphizing that leads some men to refuse to get their dog or cat neutered.
I grew up in a home that always had a couple of cats, always indoor cats and always declawed (as kittens, and at the same time they had the spaying or neutering surgery, as someone mentioned above). All of them were extremely active, healthy cats–no biting, no litterbox problems, and no impeded movement or other issues claimed to be always present in declawed cats.
Of course this is going back quite a while–the veterinarians who did the operations were all very experienced at doing them. No doubt that made a great difference to the cats’ health and quality of life as indoor cats. Today, such results might be more difficult to come by (and so I agree with all those urging the adoption of already-declawed cats from shelters).
If the home is big enough and there are lots of toys and windows and another cat to play with, the evidence of “happiness” is extremely convincing. If cats live a long time in good health and are playful and active, then I can’t see how you can argue that their happiness is inferior or reduced in comparison with the cats that are free to chase birds and fight other cats and try to outrun coyotes.
I had a neighbor who cat would come to hunt of mice in my yard and I told my neighbor that I have seen coyotes and foxes in my yard . My neighbor said her cat likes to be outside , I found out from a mail carrier that the cat never returned home one day . 
An outside cat or a small dog would become a snack for coyote around here , a coyote came right up to my dog when he was his leash and I was with my dog . I once saw a hawk fly off with a small animal too .
In this particular instance, Mom can only afford the rent because Idle Thoughts lives with her. Which raises the question of who Mom thinks is going to pay to spay & declaw this new cat (and who does she expect to deal with the heavy cat litter). It certainly doesn’t give Idle Thoughts’ Mom room to get shirty about “her” house and, probably, “her” furniture.
I agree, adopting a previously declawed shelter cat is the best suggestion.
OP, if your mom is worried about her furniture, maybe a pet isn’t a good idea. Animals who are trained to stay off the furniture will still walk by and shed hair, but it will be on the sides where its harder to clean than the cushions.
I also vote for you encouraging your mom to adopt an adult declawed cat. Our old sick guy came to me already declawed. He was a full adult when he came crying to my door, skinny, hungry, unable to climb trees to escape coyotes and shot in the mouth. :mad:
He’s probably 18 now, I’m not sure. He has problems with some litter, the bigger grained stuff seems to bother his feet. He’s never bit a person, but he does have claws on his back feet and is willing to use them. I can see that he would really like to do a full stretch on a scratching post, but he doesn’t have the front anchors to do it.
He’s a good cat.
Our other 4 cats are all fully clawed. They don’t claw the furniture, not even the free standing stuff. They like their scratchers better, they can get a better workout.
Well, it’s not the first time you’ve been wrong about something on here.
I missed the part where this topic was implying I felt this way about the subject at hand rather than being annoyed/upset with someone else who is displaying that opinion.
A Pit thread saying “I hate black people” by an OP would be trolling. A Pit thread saying “I Pit my coworker, who just said to me ‘I hate black people’” is not. One is trying to get people to think they feel that way about it themselves and the other is complaining about an interaction you had with someone during their day, which…AFAIK…is normal for the Pit. I’m sorry you fail to see the difference, although I kind of think that you may be the one–in all actuality–who is trying to get a trolling reaction if you’re really going to pretend there’s not a difference between those two types of topics.
In any case, I’m not going to be replying to you again in this topic.
Oh, so every time you’ve said something you know would be controversial here, you’ve been trolling? I guess all those conservative posts have been trolling. I’m sure that people will love to report them.
I thought you were kidding. If not, you’re being a moron. What evidence do you have that Idle is trying to piss people off rather than genuinely upset about his mom wanting to declaw a cat?
Oh, and doing the thing you are accusing others of is dumb, even if it’s not against the rules. Calling a mod a troll is far more trollish than anything Idle did. And you, unlike him, are on record as enjoying “tweaking” people. Which you were told was trolling.
I did not understand the OP title at all. “Rents”?? All I could think of was I.T. was a landlord and “rents” was referring to tenants. 
“Parents,” of course (which I’m sure you’ve figured out by now.) Maybe it’s a generational or regional slang. I don’t ever remember using it in anything but a self conscious tongue-in-cheek manner, but it was around in the mid-90s during college, for sure (1993 I think is when I first came across it.)
Or you could just arm your cat.
Only by people with very little perspective.
How are you defining trolling? Posting your opinion on a “hot button” topic is not inherently trolling by any definition I know. Idle Thoughts would have to be doing so for the purpose of getting a rise out of people. I see no evidence of that in this OP.
I’d also like to suggest the OP cut mum some slack.
I sure hope you don’t show that type of tude to the rents IRL.
For what it’s worth, we have a little fluffy bundle of love/hateable joy/grief ourselves; a stray we took in.
We didn’t get it declawed, because I thought that would be cruel.
And it has systematically ruined every wooden surface in the house with scratching, despite our every effort to train it otherwise.
It has at least learned to shit in the litterbox, so it’s one up on Shodan.
Wow… how dumb do you have to be to think… doofus really called the police… bwa… brain implodes from stupid