by Ruth
(England)
Losing any essential body part must be very traumatic to a person or to an animal. In fact it must be something like a bereavement
I know two gentlemen who have each lost a leg and the sadness in their eyes when they realised their limb had gone forever was heartbreaking. Each one misses his leg of course and just because cats can’t tell us how they feel it doesn’t mean they don’t miss their amputated parts too.
Poster by Ruth
Horrible as it was for those men, the amputations saved their lives and they knew why they had to go through with it.
But how much different the amputation of a cats last toe joints is! Healthy essential toe ends removed and thrown in the trash.
If those much missed parts had a burial as in the poster, would it maybe bring it home to the cats caretakers just what they had paid a vet to do ?
I can’t understand why a person trained to help animals agrees to, in fact sometimes encourages the cruel surgery called declawing by hiding the fact that it is amputation just as much as the removal of any other limb is.
Are cats so low in the estimation of those vets that they don’t care that they have feelings of loss?
It seems so to me.
Of course cats grieve for their lost claws!!! That’s why they become withdrawn and will resort to biting since they can’t use their claws for defense. Not only that, but their feet will continue to hurt for the rest of their lives (phantom pain), the nerves, tendons, and ligaments have also been cut, and these retract back into the leg, and the paws will become “frozen”; no longer able to flex. Arthritis and muscle weakness will follow, since the cat can’t hook into the post or tree and set back to give themselves a good workout. Cats are stoic though, because if they showed pain, that would alert a predator.