Will Women Veterinarians Stop the Declawing of Cats In the USA?

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.