WPBN: At the New Hampshire State House, a proposal to prohibit the declawing of cats is going to be brought back up for discussion very soon.
In order to remove a cat’s claws, the bones of the paw must be amputated during the surgical procedure. A law that would have prohibited the surgery was introduced in 2023 by legislators, but it was unsuccessful in the state Senate.
Mike Bordes, a congressman from Laconia who also owns a cat, is the driving force behind the most recent proposed bill as well as prior efforts in the State House to put an end to declawing.
“I just think cruelty to animals should not be tolerated anywhere, never mind in New Hampshire,” Bordes stated. “And, in my personal view and opinion, it is cruelty to the animal.”
Additionally, local animal rights organizations and veterinarians have advocated for the prohibition of declawing in the state of New Hampshire.
As the proprietor of Court Street Vet in Keene, Dr. Sabrina Estabrook-Russett has expressed her support for Bordes’ ideas to prohibit the practice of declawing. As an analogy, she compared it to severing the entire tip of a human finger.
“I think veterinary medicine and surgery as a whole has really started to advance,” Estabrook-Russett stated. “And most veterinarians are deeply uncomfortable performing this procedure”
According to Estabrook-Russett, the operations that involve declaring a cat pregnant can have long-term consequences for the animal, including changes in behavior and physical suffering.
It is possible for owners to give their cats up to shelters as a result of this, and regardless of whether or not the surgery is performed successfully, the cats frequently experience difficulties.
There have been some cat owners who have campaigned for the surgery, stating that scratching could be harmful to the health of the owners as well as the upholstered furnishings in their homes.
However, Estabrook-Russett adds that these arguments are frequently based on speculation and are not backed by professionals in the medical field.
Declawing is already against the law in the states of New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, District of Columbia.
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However, it is impossible to obtain accurate data regarding the number of declawing treatments that are carried out in the state of New Hampshire.
The 2023 measure proposed by Bordes was met with opposition from a number of legislators, who argued that the bill was superfluous if the operations were not carried out frequently within the state.
Before Estabrook-Russett purchased the clinic in 2018, she removed the data from her own practice and prohibited the operation from taking place there. During the year prior to the sale of the firm, she discovered that there had been a minimum of sixteen declawing treatments performed there.
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