Ha ha, I don’t. I took my new kitten to the vet for his
final round of booster shots the other day and the vet asked, with visible
trepidation, “Are you thinking about declawing?”
I explained that I don’t believe in declawing and she sagged
with relief. “Good,” she said, and smiled. “I don’t believe in it either.”
I’ve discussed this before, but it bears repeating:
Declawing a cat is form of torture. When you get a cat declawed, they just chop
off its toes halfway. It’s as if someone chopped off your fingers in between
the first and second knuckle. And they don’t carefully remove them at the
joint, either. They use a guillotine clipper, which is a surgical tool that
operates like a cigar cutter, and they just chop the toes off. It causes all
kinds of physical problems for the cat, like risk of infection and crippling
arthritis, and psychological problems, too, because it leaves the cat unable to
defend itself.
But anyway, I digress. Jim and I got a new couch recently,
after our old couch collapsed during a party. The cats have already scratched
the sh*t out of a two-seater Lazy Boy that was left in the house by a previous
owner. I still keep it half out of a need for auxiliary seating and half
because I keep hoping that the cats will focus their furious destructive energy
on it instead of on the good furniture that I actually paid money for.
I mean, I also bought a
giant cat tree for the cats.
This freaking cat tree is as
tall as I am, and I’m fairly tall for a woman. It’s bigger than some apartments
I’ve had, and it incorporates no fewer than ten scratching posts. Now, it’s
possible to train cats to scratch only specific things. When I only had Fatty,
I had him trained pretty well, but then I got Max and he’s stubborn. No matter
how many times I tell him “NO!” and squirt him with the water bottle, he just
keeps doing what he wants to do. I’m 79% sure he’s pretending to be stupider
than he is so I’ll let him get away with walking on the counters. He’s stubborn
about that, too.
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| This beautiful douche. |
The problem with that is
that Fatty immediately decided, “Hey, if he
gets to do whatever, I’m going to
do whatever, too!” So now we’re back to the ripped and shredded square one.
I’ve tried putting cat repellent on Jim’s recliner, but the beautiful, stubborn douche still scratches
it. After we got the couch, I bought some of these cat scratch guards to put on
it:
I’ve been pondering them for
years, but I’ve always been skeptical. They’re just strips of plastic that you
pin to the corners of your sofa, chair, or ottoman, and they’re supposed to
deter scratching. I always thought they’d just scratch the whole rest of the
couch, instead. But neither Jim nor I wanted the new couch scratched up. It
cost us $300, and we paid an extra $100 to have it delivered and the old couch
taken away. We bought it at Big Lots, and they don’t deliver, but they gave us
the number of a guy with a pickup truck, which is every big as questionable as
it sounds. When I first agreed to the price, I thought I was getting ripped
off, but that was before the dude and his two helpers spent the better part of
an hour shoving it through my narrow, narrow doorway. They had to take the
doors off, and one of the guys had to lie down on my stairwell in order to guide
the couch up the stairs as the other two guys shoved from outside with all
their might. It was worth $100, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, I digress. Jim and I
didn’t want the cats scratching the new couch, so I ordered the cat scratch
guards on Amazon right away. They came in a giant box with lots of padding,
just in case the thin strips of flexible plastic might get broken in the mail.
“If the cats scratch up this
couch…” Jim began, while I was showing him the cat scratch guards.
“I’m not getting them
declawed,” I interrupted him, even though we'd already had this conversation.
“…then we’ll just have to
buy secondhand couches from now on,” he continued.
But I’m happy to report that
I applied the cat scratch guards to my couch over a week ago, and so far, they
seem to be working. Even the beautiful douche hasn’t scratched the couch, which
is just as well, because my next step is to fit him with Soft Paws, since he’s
clearly the problem.
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| Then he'll look dainty, like this fellow. ~ Image by Myllissa on Wikimedia Commons |
