A California bill that seeks to prohibit anyone besides a veterinarian from declawing a cat is heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, with bipartisan support.
The bill would allow veterinarians to declaw a cat if it’s a “medically necessary procedure to address an existing or recurring infection, disease, injury, or abnormal condition in the claws, nail bed, or toe bone, which jeopardizes the feline’s health,” according to the bill’s text.
The bill would also prohibit the procedure from being performed “for a cosmetic or aesthetic purpose or to make the feline convenient to keep or handle.”
“Mutilating healthy cats for human convenience is cruel and inhumane,” Assemblymember Alex Lee (D- Milpitas), who authored the bill, previously said in a statement. “Cat declawing is a permanent disfiguring surgery that’s equivalent to removing a person’s fingers at the top knuckle. This is a commonsense bill reinforcing that cat declawing goes against ethical treatment standards for animals.”
According to Lee’s office, the American Veterinary Medical Association has discouraged vets from performing the surgeries and states like New York, Maryland and Massachusetts have also passed bans.
Globally, dozens of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Switzerland, have banned cat declawing.
Locally, in 2003, the city of West Hollywood passed the nation’s first legislation to ban cat declawing. Several other California cities have followed since.
The bill has garnered support from multiple animal advocacy groups, but the California Veterinary Medical Association is against the bill.
Five different efforts to ban the practice in California since 2018 have failed.
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