Animal Rights: The Imprisonment of Pets
Imagine you are kidnapped and your new “owners” decide to physically change your traits in order to make you better suited for your place of captivity. They will remove your fingertips so you lose the ability to scratch. They will clip your ears and remove a part of your spine merely for cosmetic purposes. They will damage your extremities to make you incapable of escaping. They will remove your voice box so you cannot scream for help. They will hold you in a cage that is too small for you to adjust your position or lay down. This is what people do to their so-called beloved pets, and have the audacity to call them family. Many of our practices and procedures for pets are inhumane and should be stopped.…show more content… Cats have a natural urge to scratch and the simple fix is to declaw them. It seems harmless, but unknown to many people, the procedure is horrifying. A cat is declawed, most commonly, with the use of a guillotine clipper or a scalpel. The ends of the toes are amputated and sutures are used to close the wounds. This is the equivalent to a human having each finger amputated at the knuckle where the nail is located. Not only does declawing disfigure a cat’s paw, it may cause other problems in addition. A cat may become less likely to use a litter box after the surgery because the pain of using one during the healing process deters them. They may start biting more (which has more dangers of infection than a scratch) because their first line of defense was taken away. There is a great chance that their paws will be in pain for the rest of their lives (especially if the procedure was done at an older age), but the less-known pain issue is back pain caused from the disfigured paw. Declawing is far from harmless and the inhumane, pointless surgery should not be performed
