Three states have banned declawing so far in 2025.
Six down, forty four to go.
California became the sixth and latest state to ban cat declawing this week when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 867, which makes it illegal to remove a feline’s claws unless it’s medically necessary for the health and survival of the cat.
Declawing may sound like a sort of kitty manicure, but the neutral name disguises a cruel form of elective mutilation that involves amputating a cat’s toes at the first knuckle.
It’s the equivalent of chopping off a third of each finger, all to prevent potential damage to inanimate objects like furniture. The procedure has been condemned by every major animal welfare group including the Humane Society and the SPCA.
Credit: Tamba Budiarsana/Pexels
Declawing inflicts a lifetime of pain on cats, changes feline gait and posture, leads to early arthritis and causes a long list of secondary problems. For example, declawed cats are much more likely to bite because they have no other form of defense when they feel threatened, and they’re also much more likely to stop using litter boxes because it hurts to walk on the sand-like and granule texture of the litter with half-amputated toes.
Lawmakers haven’t worked out the details on how the new law will be enforced or what the penalties will be if veterinarians illegally perform the procedure. Other states have implemented a system of increasingly harsh fines and the suspension of veterinary licenses for repeat offenders.
New York became the first state to ban declawing in 2019. Maryland and Virginia followed in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and in 2025 Massachusetts, Rhode Island and now California have all passed similar laws.
Pixie the cat fought for his life and he’s now almost fully healed. Meanwhile, in Ohio, lawmakers want their state to become the sixth to ban declawing.
Back in April, a woman spotted a group of kids literally playing with fire, and was horrified when she got closer and realized they had set a cat ablaze.
She took the cat from the little demons and rushed him over to the ACCT Philly, where the stray — now dubbed Pixie — fought for his life as veterinary staff treated him.
Now Pixie, who doesn’t harbor any ill will toward people and is an affectionate, loving little dude, is all healed up and ready for his forever home.
Pixie lost most of his tail and he still suffers from some incontinence episodes — which is to be expected, given the trauma he endured — but his fur has grown back, he’s healthy and he’s ready to be loved.
“Pixie’s story is hard to read. It breaks our hearts. But it’s the reality we fight every single day,” ACCT Philly’s staff posted online. “It’s why we exist – because no animal should ever face such cruelty, and every animal deserves a second chance at life.”
Pixie has recovered from his injuries and he’s ready to go to a good home. Credit: Pennsylvania SPCA
Pixie’s “spirit has been untouched” by his ordeal. If you live in the area and think you can provide a good home for the little guy — and exhibit the patience he needs with his ongoing issues from the cruelty he endured — visit ACCT Philly to fill out an adoption form. We hope Pixie gets a great home and lives his best life.
Another state looks to ban declawing
Our representaves in congress are too busy embarrassing Americans, staging Jerry Springeresque arguments in the legislative chambers and chasing TV cameras, so naturally they have no time for an insignificant issue like animal welfare.
But if they won’t act to bring our barbarian nation in line with the civilized world when it comes to banning the mutilation of cats, at least some state governments are doing what they can.
Ohio’s representatives are pushing for their state to become the sixth to ban the cruel procedure, after New York, Maryland, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Washington, D.C., has also banned declawing, and a few dozen cities throughout the country have passed their own local prohibitions.
A bipartisan bill sponsored by a Republican and two Democrats has been introduced.
The usual villains in these efforts, the state’s Veterinary Medical Association, have trotted out the same tired arguments that declawing is “discouraged,” but shouldn’t be banned.
That argument doesn’t hold water when the veterinarians who hold VMA memberships are the types who offer package deals for kitten neutering and declawing. Not all or even most vets belong to state VMAs, and almost no veterinarians who specialize in feline care are members, but the vets who do support the group are the ones who see declawing as an income stream.
Their usual strategy is to call in favors from reps whose campaigns the group donates to, who in turn try to prevent declawing bans from ever reaching the floor for a vote.
After decades of successfully defeating such bans, the dam finally broke when New York passed its ban in June of 2019, becoming the first state to outlaw elective declawing.
We wish the bill’s sponsors, and their allies in local animal welfare groups, good luck in moving the legislation forward.
Rhode Island’s law has some teeth: veterinarians who violate it will have their licenses suspended or revoked.
Five down, forty five to go.
With a new law going into effect in the fall, Rhode Island joins New York, Maryland, Virginia and Massachusetts in banning the declawing of cats.
Declawing may sound like a sort of kitty manicure, but the neutral name disguises a cruel form of elective mutilation that involves amputating a cat’s toes at the first knuckle.
It’s the equivalent of chopping off 1/3 of each finger, all to prevent potential damage to inanimate objects like furniture.
“Declawing is painful, unnecessary and inhumane. It’s no way to treat any pet,” said Rhode Island state Sen. Melissa Murray, one of the bill’s co-sponsors. “Fortunately, there has been growing awareness of the risks and cruelty of declawing. Our state must recognize that declawing is animal abuse and prohibit it altogether.”
Rhode Island’s new law is more prohibitive than some of the others: veterinarians who declaw cats once the law goes into effect on Sept. 1 will have their licenses suspended or revoked entirely.
Declawing doesn’t “just” cause short term pain from the procedure. It forces cats to change the way they walk and move in general, altering their gaits. As a result, declawing leads to early onset arthritis among a host of other medical problems.
Declawing also results in psychological and behavioral problems. Cats who are declawed often become depressed, and they’re more likely to avoid the litter box since standing on litter is painful for them.
Since the procedure also takes away their primary defensive mechanism, declawed cats are much more likely to bite, which along with litter box avoidance means they’re more likely to end up abandoned in shelters.
Bud’s got this one, which is sold as the Ultimate Scratcher, which is about 3 feet tall and sturdy, offering an optimal place for cats to literally scratch their itch.
Cats should never be declawed!
There are several viable options for keeping them from scratching furniture, including nail caps and redirecting them to scratchers. The latter are a bare necessity if you have a cat, as scratching is a natural feline behavior and our little friends will find something to scratch if we don’t provide them with appropriate scratching surfaces.
Since cats like to stretch while they scratch, I highly recommend getting a large tower scratcher with a secure base. Bud has one, he uses it constantly, and he does not touch the couch or the chair in the living room, nor does he touch any other furniture. It can be done, it just requires patience and consistent redirecting, with positive encouragement.
Negative reinforcement, such as yelling at your cat, will not achieve results. The only thing it will accomplish is damaging your relationship and trust with your cat.
Since New York became the first state to ban declawing in 2019, more states have considered similar legislation. Although routinely opposed by state Veterinary Medical Associations — special interest groups that represent a portion of veterinarians who see declawing as a reliable money-maker — lawmakers have allied with veterinarians in support of bans, as well as groups like the Humane Society, the SPCA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Paw Project to overcome opposition and get bills passed.
As veterinarians treat the surviving animals for ailments like smoke inhalation and burned paws, donors from all over the world have contributed $750,000 to help the newly homeless moggies and ensure Happy Cat continues in some form.
Investigators are still looking for the exact cause of Monday’s fire, which claimed the life of a New York cat sanctuary founder and about 100 of its feline residents, but they now say the blaze doesn’t look suspicious.
The fire started inside the main structure at Happy Cat sanctuary, Brookhaven Fire Marshal Chris Mehrmann told local media, and investigators “cannot rule out a fire caused by propane-fed portable heaters that were in the area of fire origin.”
Happy Cat founder Christopher Arsenault, 65, was found on the second floor of the building surrounded by animals he was trying to rescue. Neighbors told investigators that they saw Arsenault emerge from the home with several cats, then dash back inside in an attempt to rescue more of the felines he cared for.
When Arsenault converted the home into a sanctuary, he cut holes in the walls and floors to create passages for the cats. Unfortunately, Mehrmann said, the fire spread more quickly because of those modifications.
In the meantime, people from the local community, the SPCA and privately run animal welfare organizations have teamed up to care for the 200 or so surviving felines. Donations have also come pouring in from all over the world, totaling more than $750,000 as of Friday morning.
More than $670,000 of the funds have come from 13,000-plus cat lovers from dozens of countries who contributed to a GoFundMe drive started by Lisa Jaeger of Jaeger’s Run Animal Rescue in nearby Port Jefferson, NY.
A memorial image created by Loving Paws, a small rescue in Suffolk County, Long Island.
The surviving cats have a range of injuries, from minor sprains to life-threatening lung damage from smoke inhalation. Volunteers have spent the past several days trying to collect the traumatized animals from the vicinity of the destroyed sanctuary.
“I knew Chris well. I knew when he started. He died doing what he loved… rescuing animals,” said Robert Misseri, co-founder of Paws of War, which brought a mobile veterinary clinic to the site of the former sanctuary this week. “The very least we can do is continue his legacy and make sure that every single one [of the] cats get the proper love and care that they need to move forward.”
Veterinarians said they’ve treated lots of cats with burnt paws. Although the animals are skittish from the harrowing experience, rescues and shelters in the area are helping them find forever homes, veterinarian Jason Michael Heller told ABC News.
“We’re going to ask for our colleagues in the area here, hopefully, to take a few cats and try to get them healthy enough to be able to eat and be adopted,” Heller said.
People in the Long Island rescue community are also working on a public memorial for Arsenault, a man who dedicated his entire life to the animals in his care.
“There’s not going to be another Chris, ever, who does this,” said John Spat of Animal Protection Service, “and all we can do is try to recover what he was trying to do and try to move forward and help his organization work forward.”
Bird flu is killing cats domestic and wild, in captivity and in nature. Experts are sounding the alarm, warning people not to feed their cats raw food, allow them to drink milk, or let them roam outside where they can easily catch the virus by going after small prey.
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, the clinical name for bird flu, is a danger to all animals, but for cats it’s a virtual death sentence.
Only a handful have survived infection thanks primarily to early diagnosis, intervention and round-the-clock veterinary care. In the vast majority of cases, the virus burns through its feline victims in three or four days.
Bird flu has become even more deadly for felines of late. Of the 126 domestic cats killed by H5N1 since 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, half of them have have died in 2025 — and it’s only been three months.
To appreciate the true scope of the problem, the more illuminating statistic may be 82 million, which is the number of chickens “culled” — killed — in the US since 2022 because they were infected or raised at facilities where other birds tested positive for the virus.
Factory farming compounds the matter: more than 1.6 million egg-laying hens and 337,000 “pullets” — chickens less than a year old — were “depopulated” at a single facility in Texas last year. As staggering as those numbers are, Texas’s Department of Agriculture noted the figure merely “accounts for approximately 3.6% of the company’s total flock.”
“To provide context on the overall size of the U.S. poultry flock, there are more than 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the United States. In 2023, more than 9.4 billion broiler chickens and 218 million turkeys were processed in the United States.”
If there ever was an example of putting too many eggs in one basket, this is it. American food supplies are vulnerable with so much concentrated in the hands of so few companies, a lesson the general public is learning the hard way now after eggs peaked at record prices last month. Things have cooled off a bit since then, but shoppers aren’t getting any benefit as grocery chains continue to charge a premium: the nationwide average for a dozen eggs was $5.90 in February, but stores in some states are still charging $10 or more.
It also raises questions about the sustainability and ethics of eating animals. Humans slaughter more than 75 billion chickens every year, and projections indicate there will be three billion more of us by the mid-2080s.
Meat from infected chickens can still end up in your cat’s bowl
Media reports about culling give the impression that those birds are removed from the food chain, but that’s not entirely true. The pet food industry has always cut corners by harvesting meat not fit for human consumption, a category that includes everything from the carcasses of sick animals, to “meat by-products” that can include beaks, hooves, eyes, hearts and other organs.
So while the culled chickens won’t show up in shrink wrap at the grocery store, they are making it into the pet food supply chain. Most pet food is “rendered,” cooked at such high temperatures that potential pathogens have been destroyed.
But an increasingly bigger slice of the market has been claimed by companies selling “premium” raw food — and that’s been the primary infection vector for domestic cats, particularly indoor cats who otherwise would have little or no exposure to the virus. (Cats who spend time outdoors can catch bird flu by preying on infected animals, just as wild cats do, and barn cats have caught it by drinking the milk of infected cattle.)
Cats are mostly lactose intolerant, and should not be given cow’s milk, despite the common misconception that it’s healthy for them.
“The animals that were depopulated could potentially have ended up in the food chain for pets,” Laura Goodman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health, told NBC News. “It’s not uncommon for substandard meat to end up in the pet food chain.”
That’s what happened to Tim Hanson’s beloved cat, Kira, who died in February after eating raw food from a company called Wild Coast. The company has recalled the product, Boneless Free Range Chicken Recipe. It’s one of four recalls in the last month alone.
Hudson is suing Wild Coast for the veterinary bills — about $8,000 — and said he was devastated that Kira, whom he called “the happiest cat,” is gone. He said he thought he was doing right by her by feeding her the expensive raw food, but now urges people to avoid feeding their cats raw food at all costs.
“I don’t want any more cats dying,” he said. “Hopefully people can learn from Kira’s passing.”
Top image via Pexels. All other images via Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 