Declawing cats leads to negative long-term effects: study

Declawing cats lead to long-term effects: study A new study shows declawing cats can lead to negative long-term effects including arthritis, aggression and back pain.

A study published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery last week found that cats that have been declawed suffer from long-term arthritis, aggression, back pain and other adverse behaviors.

Researchers studied 274 clawed and declawed cats - both those that live in a shelter and those that live in homes. They analyzed the cat’s medical histories and took x-ray photos of all declawed cat’s front legs.

The information was then sent to Saskatoon where veterinarian and researcher, Hugh Townsend, analyzed the data.

“As we went through it and started to analyze it, the results just started to fall out and they’re consistent,” Townsend said. “Declawed cats were much more likely to show those behaviors than the non-declawed cats.”

The behaviors include biting and other forms of aggression, urinating and defecating outside of the litter box and over-grooming. Long-term back pain was also found in the declawed cats.

Nicole Martell-Maron, who headed the study, said that many of these behaviors went away when the cats were given medications.

“I put them on pain medication and it will improve or get better, or resolve,” she said. “To me, that tells me that it’s pain related.”

Many European countries have banned declawing, but the practice is still legal in both Canada and the United States. That hasn’t stopped many individual shelters and veterinary clinics from banning the practice.

When Cathy Brin, public relations coordinator at the Saskatoon SPCA, read the study she said it was consistent with what they’d seen at the shelter. The SPCA doesn’t adopt cats to those who plan on declawing them.

“We've seen cats surrendered later on in their life – that have been declawed earlier – and they do have those medical issues down the line and it’s quite common,” she said. So it kind of just reinforced all of our beliefs and why we are so strongly against it.”

Last month the Regina Cat Rescue announced that it would not adopt cats to anyone who planned on declawing them.