Declaw for health

Just over two years ago my husband and I adopted a cat from the local shelter. We LOVE our cat. My husband has been in nursing school during this time and as school drew near the end we started to wonder if we should get our furry friend declaw-ed. We were worried that since my husband and the cat play a lot and frequently the cat will catch him with his claws causing open scratches on his arms that we were putting my husbands health at risk sending him into hospitals for 40+ hours a week.

We did some research but everything we found was very polarizing. Animal rights advocates in strong disagreement with those who are wanting to save their furniture. We talked with some people we knew and they said their cats survived the process. I even found one other person who had done it for health reasons after her child contracted cat scratch fever. She supported the idea that we had, as much as we love our cat it is not worth risking my husbands long term health and career.

So I called the vet and asked if they did the process. They said yes and we set an appointment.

Two days after the appointment my cat came home with bandages on his paws. I felt like an awful cat mom. That first night he got one of the bandages off. Four days latter he got the other one off. It was the weekend and the 2nd paw was looking very swollen and had blood. Of course my cat would not leave it alone. On Monday when I got home from work I brought him back to the vet. They had to keep him, the next day the called and said they were going to have to remove some of his paw because the skin cells were dead. They kept him a few more days and had to put stitches in. He came home and lived with a bandage for 10 days, we would periodically take him back to the vet for a fresh bandage.

On Monday I brought him in and they wanted to keep him so that they could get the bandage off. I got him back on Friday and his paw is gone, all that he has is the pad where his thumb should be. Yesterday it started bleeding so we went to the emergency vet who put him back on antibiotics and re-bandaged him. She said that in the 10 years she has been doing this she has seen this happen enough that she is not shocked by it and we were just the unlucky ones.

I feel like a horrid person now. I am upset that my vet did not warn us, I am upset that the polarizing information on this practice prevented us from having accurate information. I am upset that my cat has had the worst month of his life and so long as nothing else happens will be slightly amputated for the remainder of his days.

Selecting to have your pet declawed is a personal choice and one you and your family must make. There is a strong voice that says this is an inhumane practice. There is another voice that says they are our pets and we have to make choices so they can be part of our family. Because of these two opinions the practice continues on. Complications do happen. It happened to us and I will never declaw an animal again. I ask that you think about the real chance of something going wrong before you decide if declawing is what you and your family want to do.

Cars & Values

I could write a lot about our experience with cars.

To keep things simple we had spent the majority of our relationship with 1 or 0 cars between the two of us.

About 2 years ago we found ourselves living in East Texas without options for public transit to get us from home to work/ school and with unsafe (highways) walking/ bicycling choices for these same locations.

Realizing the need for a second car and our limited social support network as well as the need to have reliable vehicles with fixed expenses we decided that a new car was the right choice for our current situation.

So we started looking and looking and looking. During the process we talked a lot about what we believed in. Low environmental impact, social statements, supporting the move to smaller alternatives. We went test driving, SMART, Scion IQ, Chevy Spark, Toyota Yaris and Fiat 500.

The fiat felt right, it had that small car look that we wanted to integrate into our community, managed to have 5 seats, felt some what roomy, reportedly good gas mileage, the price was right and the bright blue captured my husbands heart.

We are not crazy about the Fiat, its maintenance has been annoying as it needs special items that our service stations don't carry for routine things such as oil changes. The vehicle is somewhat cheaply made so things come loose and rattle around annoyingly. But I am getting side tracked.

Two years ago we had not seen another Fiat in our town, small cars were non existent, SMART cars were on display at Ford lots with windups attached to the back to make them look like toys. People drove trucks, the bigger the better, If you were too poor for a truck you drove an old poorly maintained sedan.

We got asked constantly about the Fiat, how the gas was, did it feel too small, what the price point was, how it did on the highway, did we like it?

Slowly, about 4 months into owing the Fiat we started to see a few more small cars take to the streets. Local businesses started to drive Fiats as their company cars plastered with marketing materials. 7 months into ownership Teenage girls begun to be seen driving Fiats (teen new car ownership is a common place in oil communities). 18 months in we started to see an increase in adults driving small cars during morning commutes.

Now we cant say with certainty that the slow shift to an increase of smaller cars and Fiats was because of us. Still less than 3% of the vehicles we in our community see are smaller cars, but the change is tangible.

About two months ago a friend of ours car broke down for the last time and he needed to buy a new car. He got a Chevy spark, in a bright blue. When we asked him about it, he did not do it for any value based region. He was not trying to demonstrate option to his community. He did it because he had been a passenger in ours so much, he enjoyed the above average gas mileage, the nimble handling of a small car and the low price for a new vehicle.

We know for a fact that we opened up conversations and consideration of smaller cars in our community and that at least one person who in the past would have bought a truck opted to buy a small car because of our role modeling small car living in a big truck world.