Moments of Permanence - On cats, claws and paddy-paws

From: willow Date: December 29th, 2012 06:51 am (UTC) (Link)

Sometimes' it's felt like people don't have the patience to pay attention to Cats. And thus end up doing stuff. But yeah, I didn't hear about Declawing until the US hmm, 10ish or so years ago. Before that, I thought it had something to do with surgical removal of an extra long dew claw. And surgery was because it wasn't properly controlled and thus catching on things.

And given that in the wild, catching on things would get it ripped off. I thought surgery was humane for something like that.

I was as shocked as could be when I discovered what it really was - mutilation in the name of convience. Because somehow having a cat in and around the home wasn't meant to result in any scratches at all.

As someone who the majority of the time ended up adopting cats off the street? Who'd watched even my mom, purr and merrow a cat into coming close enough to pet -who took scratches as a given in such a situation, who'd had enough cats to know that to be scratched w/ claw is either an accident of overstimulation or something really really wrong. I was pretty much @_)#$I)#$.

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From: sami Date: December 29th, 2012 02:12 pm (UTC) (Link)

Yeah, a few months ago I got a light scratch from a friend's cat, and the friend went to chide the cat, and I was all, "No, that was pretty much entirely my fault."

Because cats scratch, occasionally, but barring emotionally wounded cats like Mouse, it's not that common.

I think one of the main things people do it for actually seems to be also to prevent the cats clawing the furniture, which... I have no words for how much I disapprove of that, seriously.

And also, in my experience, if your cat is clawing the furniture, it is generally a sign that it's incredibly bored. Give it more things to do! The only cat of ours who ever clawed the furniture was Spike, who did it *when he was a kitten*, and was trained out of that with a mixture of "No!"s and a water pistol.

He later developed a more persistent problem with spraying inside the house, including shorting out an electrical socket, but that stopped after we had him neutered. Which we actually did slightly younger than one normally might, because by five months old he was the tomcattest tomcat I've ever seen. He had a girlfriend. He was five months old and I'm pretty sure he was a father.

But in any case, spaying/neutering is a whole different thing from declawing.

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