And I thought I'd had a bad week or two

[cjsmith]

Lately I've been noticing Duchess, the largest of my cats, clicking when she walked. Time to clip her claws. She doesn't love it, but she permits it. I started in on her a half hour ago.

I was way, way too late.

Ever seen an ingrown claw? A badly ingrown claw? On a forepaw, which the cat uses to dig in the sandbox?

I just doctored one.

She is the sweetest, most patient cat in the universe. I am not speedy with this type of thing. I am positive that it hurt, probably badly, at more than one stage in the "treatment". But she didn't do more than twitch and make a little vocal complaint.

Poor Duchess! She's been walking on that thing for ages like this. And she just had it pulled out, by an amateur, with (forgive me here, folks, it's the best thing I had for the job at hand) a pair of pliers. I can only imagine how much it's been hurting. I am such a bad kittymom, letting it go that long :-( :-(. At least it's out now.

Comments

[firecat]

She knew you were making her feel better.

My cat Angus is front-declawed (he came into the shelter that way) and seems to be fine with it, but a disproportionate number of the declawed cats that come into the animal shelter are very frightened and anti-social, so it does seem to affect some of them poorly; I don't know what combination of factors causes that.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

She must have. I don't think either of my other two would have caught on!

Due to my general silliness I now feel the need to state, for the benefit of non-cat-persons who may read this, that the only portion of Duchess I "declawed" with pliers was the pad of her toe. ;-)