Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Declaw Your Cats
We know: you want to keep your furniture looking pristine and want no scratches on your skin. But what does it do to the cat?
Many veterinary clinics are now banning the practice on the Declawing of Cats because of what the process actually does, and how it effects your cat’s life in the long run.
According to the Humane Society of the United States, people are often looking for a quick fix for unwanted scratching, but declawing your cat can cause many problems. The lightest of which can make your cat not use the litter box or more likely to bite.
But that’s not the worst of the issue: it’s what happens to the paws once they’ve been declawed.
The process of declawing is essentially amputating a cat’s toes, and it’s the equivalent of taking off our fingers up to our knuckles, as Declawing.com notes. Ouch, right?
The Humane Society also shares this:
“Medical drawbacks to declawing include pain in the paw, infection, tissue necrosis (tissue death), lameness, and back pain. Removing claws changes the way a cat’s foot meets the ground and can cause pain similar to wearing an uncomfortable pair of shoes. There can also be a regrowth of improperly removed claws, nerve damage, and bone spurs.”
It is also said that putting that kind of trauma on the paw can later lead to arthritis in the paw, backs, and shoulders, according to Paws.org.
After all that, we’d hope you’d reconsider declawing a cat, but if you choose to keep the claws and would like some sort of middle ground, you can get easy to apply nail-caps for covering the cat’s claws. You can find those at SoftPaws.com.
