From: nancy@hayduke (Nancy Feagans)
Subject: Re: declawing?
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA)
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 00:47:56 GMT

I have had many cats over the years.  Since the late '60s, all my
cats have been strictly indoor kitties. None of these cats was/is
declawed.  Reaching back, neither Poose, Tykie, Bailey, Wolf, Sadie,
Alex, or Spirit has ever damaged or destroyed any household
furnishings, curtains, draperies, or the like.  I may be just lucky,
but then again maybe not.  Perhaps it's a matter of taking the time
with your cats like I do and provide the following:
 
 - a cat post or tree in each room of the house where there is
upholstered furniture and where the cat(s) spends time.  In my
2 bedroom condo, I have a 3' post with a circular top shelf in the
living room; in the kitchen, a 5'6" tree with 3 shelves (one for each cat)
so they can lounge and peer out the window; and 1 kitty condo style
in my bedroom.
 
 - toys.  They love the little fur mice; the bizzy balls; the felt
catnip mice (and birds).
 
 - a weekly claw trim for each cat.  This works wonders, and once they
get used to it (consistency is the key here) they don't mind.
 
 - a well-placed squirt from the dreaded water pistol if they forget, on
rare occasions, and start to stretch their legs on the couch.  This 
couch, by the way, is 10 years old, fully upholstered (no wooden
accents), and has suffered NO damage from any of the last five cats
named above.  
 
I can't, for the life of me, understand why *any* cat, given the things
listed above, would choose to destroy furniture;  I would tend to think 
that the real problem lies with the cat's owner.  People who mutilate
their animals (and this goes for those who modify their dogs - cut ears
and dock tails - for stylistic purposes, too) for their own convenience
rather than provide alternatives, clip nails, or train *not* to scratch
the no-nos by choosing to declaw should seriously examine their motives
for having the animal.
 
At a recent trip to the local Petco, I noticed a "No Claw/Dig" type of 
repellant in a spray bottle.  The shop manager told me it's a big
seller, and that peoplehave had extremely good luck using the spray
on items not to be scratched.  Though I never had to resort to this
stuff, I thought it was worth passing along.
 
Obviously a cat would, in 99% of the cases anyway, be better off
declawed than being euthanized.  But why should it have to come to
that choice?  I guess what I've always felt for animals can best
be expressed in the following quotation from Henry Beston, circa
1928:
 
	"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical
concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by
complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature
through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather
magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them
for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken
form so far below ourselves.  And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older
and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with
ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the
splendor and travail of the earth."


-- 

Nancy J. Feagans     (818) 306-6423
Jet Propulsion Lab   nancy@jpl-devvax.Jpl.Nasa.Gov
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."
Newsgroups: rec.pets.cats