AVMA Still Leave the Door Open to Declawing
The AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association) still leave the door open to declawing when the door should be slammed shut and padlocked. They say declawing is “controversial”. I say it is immoral, inhumane and unethical and I know I am right.
Surely the time has come to genuinely change the policy: to ban it. But the AVMA still mess around with their policy, tinkering with it, while firmly leaving the option for declawing open.
What they say today is that if an AVMA vet is satisfied the cat’s owner has paid “conscientious attention to behavioral modification and alternatives” without success and their client’s cat still scratches furniture, declawing the cat may be considered.
That is a no change state of affairs. The AVMA has done nothing to change things; to reduce the options when declawing could be carried out.
In different words, this organisation, who should be genuinely concerned with cat welfare and are not, are saying that if a cat scratches furniture it is okay to declaw the cat provided the cat’s owner meekly tells the veterinarian “Oh, doctor, I’ve tried to stop him but he keeps scratching my new sofa”.
How did she try? What did she do? Nothing meaningful I guess. In any case the whole sorry state of affairs is a charade.
The veterinarians totally ignore the AVMA. The AVMA policy has no force and carries no weight whatsoever. Annually, on millions of occasions across America, veterinarians who are members of the AVMA, totally disregard their feeble policy and declaw cats to order. Some vets even promote it as a standard procedure, bundled together with neutering.
No change then? When there is no progress on something as immoral as declawing it is a backward step. The AVMA are dinosaurs in a modern world. They have no authority over their members. If the AVMA actually banned declawing their members would ignore them, disband the organisation and create a new one. For this reason the AVMA has to do as they are told by their money-grabbing vets.
The AVMA cannot rock the money boat.