What is the actual procedure involved in declawing a cat?
There are several different techniques, but they all involve one thing. You have to remove the claw, and you have to remove the little piece of bone that the claw grows from. If you don’t, the claw will try to grow back. The less you remove, the better, and that’s where the differences in techniques come in. The way cats are normally declawed, there’s an instrument with a sliding blade, almost like a guillotine, and it cuts a straight line through the joint between that little piece of bone and the next piece of bone, which is much bigger. When you do that, right underneath that is the pad, and you actually cut that right in half, too. So it’s like cutting the tip of your finger off. With cosmetic declawing, you use a tiny curved blade to go in and dissect out the claw and the tiny piece of bone. The pad is intact; all the soft tissue is there. So the cat is walking comfortably very quickly because its pads are fine. When the pads are cut in half, the cat can’t walk on them without dis
