Traditionally, women are the nurturers and men are the hunters. It seems that those roles are cast in concrete. These roles go back to the beginning of homo sapiens. The roles are alive and well today. Perhaps men are deliberately ensuring that these specific roles remain in place because it suits them. It is still a man’s world and arguably men want to keep women down in the home, out of the way looking after the children while they get on with the job of bringing in the bread with less competition from women. As an aside…..certainly in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan women is squashed socially by men through removing them from education. Muslim extremists (Boko Haram) in Africa hate the education of girls.
So the question is whether women are genetically programmed to be nurturers or whether men have just decided that they should be nurturers despite evolution tending to merge the roles.
If women are genetically programmed to be nurturers then you would be forgiven for thinking that it must be extremely difficult for a female veterinarian to declaw a domestic cat on the instructions of the cat’s owner and at the convenience of the cat’s owner without there being a shred of benefit in it for the domestic cat: quite the contrary, obviously, because the cat will suffer tremendously as a result and will have 10 lifelong amputations to deal with.
So, let’s for a minute make a presumption that because women are nurturers they find it very difficult to declaw cats or at least they find it much more difficult than men to carry out the operation. That would seem to be a reasonable presumption because nurturing means the following:
- care for and encourage the growth or development of.
- something that nourishes
“Care for” and “nourishes” are a phrase and the word which, as far as I’m concerned, are at the other end of the spectrum from what happens when a veterinarian removes the last phalange of the ten front toes of a domestic cat. There is a brutality about that operation and there’s nothing caring in it. The operation does not nourish the cat but damages the cat. Nourishment implies something is given while the operation take something away from the cat: the exact opposite.
And, in this article, I am equating the nurturing of a baby with the nurturing of a domestic cat and I think that is a very reasonable thing to do because many female cat owners regard their domestic cat companion to be a family member on an equal footing to their children.
Which brings me to another difficult question: why do women who are very good mothers to their children, ask a veterinarian to declaw their cat? This apparent conflict in behaviours may indicate that women are not genetically programmed to be nurturers but, as stated in the opening paragraph, they are subtly kept in the nurturing role by men who still run the world.
Despite that rather pessimistic outlook, at present in America, 50% of veterinarians are women while 80% of veterinary students are women. This implies that in the future more than 50% of veterinarians in America will be women which begs question whether there will be a slowing up of the declawing of cats in the future because of this changing demographic.
Well, I agree with that and it is a shame. The women’s lib movement must be partly to blame. Women should not try and be like men. Life is better for a woman doing what she is good at and I am all for equality and open choices for all but not shoe-horning women into male roles if they don’t want it. I feel some women are pressured into taking on male roles.
No Michael sadly not and it seems that increasingly more and more women are hurting, even murdering their own offspring then the poor little feline doesn’t stand a chance. Women are becoming more like men in a lot of respects and yes there’s this raw aggression and its frightening. Is it evolution or just a shift with modern times?
Thank you Ruth. I feel the same way as you about women trying to be men! It doesn’t work and it is a misguided objective. I agree that men can be equally caring to women. I just hoped that the innate nurturing ability of women because they are childbearing and they do give birth to children might express itself in their attitude towards the domestic cat when they are amputating parts of their toes, but sadly not.
I think ‘womens lib’ has gone too far and it’s quite frightening to us older people to see raw aggression in young females, they are trying to be like men!
I’ll get shot down in flames by some women, but take being a soldier, women don’t have the physique to fight, I don’t think it’s fair on their male colleagues.
I have always been brave when it’s for a cause, but those women here with the multitude of cats breeding even dress like men and I have no doubt whatsoever they could turn physically violent. They are anti social in many ways other than not having their cats neutered, but no one dares to challenge them.
I’ve worked with both male and female vets and did find the women showed more emotion that the men but all were equally caring and I’m sure not a single one of them would have ever declawed a cat if they were asked to.