To drive the point home, when you ask your vet to declaw your cat you are asking her to do the human equivalent of chopping off the fingers of a person at the last knuckle with a cigar cutter. It is that crude and damaging. It is worse than that, actually, awful though the description is, because cats are digitigrades, they walk on their toes. So cat owners who declaw their cats are asking their cats to walk on shattered toes. Yes, they are shattered because these bloody (literally) vets often botch the surgery because they are (a) poor surgeons and/or (b) they are using the equivalent of a cigar cutter to do the job and (c) they do it damn quickly, far too quickly because they don’t care enough.
Is that bad enough for anyone considering declawing to think again because I am not exaggerating? I hope so. No one who understands declawing should ask a vet to declaw their cat because if they do they should not own a cat. Please God, can cat owners in North America wake up to this brutalisation of the domestic cat. This is a horror story played out under the noses of veterinarians, cat owners and politicians who should be making laws to stop it.
It is a long running domestic cat version of a Nightmare on Elm Street but the majority of the N. American population are blind to it. It is the elephant in the room of the human-to-animal relationship in the United States.
For the sake of all that is decent in America, stop this nightmare. I am begging you. For how long is N. America going to accept this? It started in the 1950s. Do you want me to work out how many hundreds of millions of cats have been tortured like this? You could pile up the pain like a mountain. A throbbing mountain of pain and shame.
