Opinion of Cat Declawing

[angus]

oppose.  I knew a girl once who did this to her cat.  Seemed weird to me.  Sadistic. 

The main thing you want to do with cats is leave them alone.  If you don't feed them, they won't follow you home.  If you pull their claws out, then you sort of have a moral obligation to feed them.  Anyway, a de-clawed cat is about as useless a thing as I can imagine.  I definitely don't want any cats living in my house,  but If I did have need for a cat, like if I had a farm with a rat problem, I sure wouldn't want it to be without its claws.

[angus]

I don't even like cats and I think it's pretty sadistic to de-claw, penetrate, or emasculate them.

Seems to me that overpopulation of cats and dogs is a self-correcting problem, and in any case wouldn't exist if humans hadn't plucked them from the wild and fed them till they're so fat and useless that they no longer know how to do anything except piss on the carpet and beg for food.  I do understand their domestication and exploitation.  If I were blind I'd probably want a well-trained service dog.  If it were 1642 and we were setting off on a five-month trans-Atlantic voyage in order to colonize the new property and eradicate the indigenous human population, I'd want a cat or two on board that wooden vessel with me.  Or if I had a barn full of grain I'd want a year-around population of at least one cat.  If I hunted for a living or lived way out in the country where there were no alarms or cops, I might want a great big toothy dog.

I'm not in any of those situations, and none of the folks I know who keep cats and dogs are in that situation.  They're lonely control freaks with misplaced affections.  Consider the typical cat lover.  She is a spinster who doesn't really want, or know how to interact with, human company.  Her parents, the ones who clothed and fed and nurtured her when she was too small and helpless to care for herself, have been placed in the care of strangers in a strange building, far away.  She's lonely so she gets a cat--lonely, mind you, but willing to pay big dollars for not having to deal with her human relations--and houses her cat in her 700-square-foot apartment where it's not allowed to act like a cat.  The poor bastard has no birds to chase or squirrels to harass, so he claws at the curtains, which prompts our hero to have her cat de-clawed and de-fanged, and, lest he get horny and spray the carpets, emasculated.  All because she doesn't want her shit to get scratched up or pissed on.  Here's a clue:  If you don't want your furniture destroyed, then don't go around collecting animals and bring them into your house.  Let them live free and in the wild.  

[angus]

For those of you against declawing cats, are you against eating cats? I'm against both.

ah, not really.  Like I said, there are circumstances under which keeping a cat is entirely appropriate.  Living in a regularly-pesticized, small apartment with easily damaged luxury furnishings isn't one of those circumstances.