Discover Top Posts Tagged with #cat declawing

Wish I could stop seeing that black cat with it's front legs shaved being reblogged as cute.

It's legs are shaved because the surgery that was performed was a front declaw.

Declawing cats is not cute. I get wanting a cute cat post but there are actually millions of other ones out there. Pls declawing is terrible.

Declawing is maiming a cat. It is literally cutting off the first bone in each of it's digits. The equivalent of cutting off each of your fingers to the first joint.

#cat declawing #i work in the vet field #it is not pretty #and i wish id never have to work through a other declaw evee again

2 votes and 0 comments so far on Reddit

#michigan #cat declawing #pets

Wednesday Creature Feature ~ June 19, 2019 - https://paulwesleychronicles.com/wednesday-creature-feature-june-19-2019/ #PaulWesley

New Post has been published on https://paulwesleychronicles.com/wednesday-creature-feature-june-19-2019/

Wednesday Creature Feature ~ June 19, 2019

Kenya Wildlife Services Announces Rare White Giraffe is Pregnant!

A sanctuary in Kenya is home to the critically endangered Hirola Antelope and the only white giraffe in the world.

The white giraffe is expecting a baby (due date is unknown). The wildlife service is unsure if the baby will be white (fingers crossed) or not but it is the giraffe’s second calf as one was born in 2017! Click here for more details.

New York Poised to become First State to Ban Cat Declawing!

At the request of cat owners there is new legislation in the state of New York requesting that New York ban cat declawing. If this were to pass NY would be the first state to ban this act. It would also fine owners $1,000 if they were to declaw their cat. Declawing is illegal in Europe and much of Canada as well as some major cities in the United States. The procedure is really quite terrible. It involves amputating the cats toes back to the first knuckle. Human nails are not attached to bones like cats “nails” are. Vets have to slice through tendons and nerves to remove the section of the toe where the nail will not grow back. The procedure can cause long term problems including walking and pain for the cat. For those owners who did not know the process I hope that this article informs you for the future. Click here for more.

Lions, Tigers, Bears & more Rescued from Canada Roadside Zoo!

Credit for stories ~ corresponds with links

Editor ~ Chelsea Dugger

#cat declawing #Humane Society #Paul Wesley #rescued animals #Wednesday Creature Feature #white giraffe

I didn’t find out until earlier this year that declawing is basically amputation, and even though I was really young when they were declawed and my parents didn’t know it was not good for them I still feel bad that my kitties had to go through that :,( They still have their back claws and they don’t seem to be too effected by it, but if they start having balance problems in the future because of it do you know of any way I could help them?? (P.s. thank you for making that post! I learned a lot!)

I feel you, my family cat growing up was front declawed because my mom ran an in-home daycare & didn’t want her to scratch the daycare kids. :/ So instead the kids terrorized her & she hid upstairs for most of her life. I still feel horrible for all she had to put up with.

The biggest things would be to make sure all of their stuff is accessible (on carpet, add more steps or ramps for trees if needed, etc.), soft litter if they seem to have trouble with that, and keep a close eye on them for signs of trouble moving or arthritis so they can get medication as needed.

I have it in my queue so it’ll get reblogged soon, but here’s a great post that @happyhealthycats made with a lot more info! https://happyhealthycats.tumblr.com/post/176275856160/if-someone-was-planning-to-adopt-a-declawed-cat

#cats #cat care #cat declawing #declawed cat care #cat health #asks

how can i help get cat declawing banned???

#help #cat declawing #veterinary #animal rights

The bad thing.

Betsy DeVos is our new Secretary of Education.

One positive outcome of this election is that’s it’s suddenly woken me up to how little I know about pretty much everything. I consider myself a pretty smart person, but it’s now clear I’ve been living in a privileged cocoon for the last 33 years, able to survive and live my life without needing to deeply understand all the messy details about why my survival is possible. That is the product of my privilege but also the result of a functioning 21st century democracy. How WELL it functions is another thing altogether, but still, America is a highly desired country to live in for a reason.

But now that I feel like everything I love and cherish about America is in peril, I’m realizing how dumb I am. There are so many things that I just don’t know.

The first area where this became most apparent to me was with this appointment and thinking about education. Education is my career and I hope it continues to be my career until the day I have to retire. I love my job deeply and care about the education of young people in America and around the world very, very much.

But when it comes to knowing how much my job is or is not at stake under Betsy DeVos’s leadership, I realized I have no idea. I know that public education is paid for through a combination of local, state, and federal taxes and programs, but how much of each? How much control does the state have versus the Department of Education? I do have vague answers to each of these from my experience and learning in the past, but I want to know all the messy details. So this will likely not be the first time I write in here about it. I hope it’s not.

But for now, I’ll start with what I know.

Betsy DeVos and the large coalition behind her of private foundations, corporations, and politicians from both the left and the right are the enemy of public education. They believe that our public schools are failing and that the entire structure should be privatized and replaced with a variety of charter, online, and private schools.

This is the path our Department of Education has been on since No Child Left Behind. It was sadly continued during President Obama and Arne Duncan’s administration. It’s been set up almost perfectly: create LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE standards of accountability through No Child Left Behind. (Anyone from either side of the aisle will tell you that 100% proficiency in standardized tests for all children in all schools, without any meaningful accommodations for special ed or English Language Learners, is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE. I have never used the word literally so literally.) At the same time, start a vicious public campaign against teachers. An educational drain the swamp, if you will: bad test scores? Fire the teachers, close the schools. To help replace those “bad teachers” and “failing schools,” invest more than ever in “choice”--vouchers, charters, private schools--and create avenues for more corporate and private investment in education than ever in our history.

When schools can’t live up to those LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE standards? Tout it as evidence that our public education system is broken and ready to be dismantled entirely. Let the privatization that has been happening for years truly take hold and run free.

And to be honest, I think any Republican nominee, even a sane one, would have chosen someone like Betsy DeVos for their Secretary of Education. Even Hillary, who I love, probably wouldn’t have chosen someone that really wanted to buck the standardized test, privatization momentum. She is a good politician and there’s simply too much bipartisan support for it now. But Betsy DeVos is a particularly concentrated form of this viewpoint. If anything, I’m hoping her transparency of corporate interests might make her easier to fight.

Before I describe why I think this road we’re on is bad, let me say that I am not a complete educational demagogue. Some of the best people I know, that care about children deeply, have worked and are working for charter schools. I do NOT believe that online schools, or certain alternative schools, offer as high of a quality education as well-funded public schools, but I DO believe that they are necessary for some students that simply cannot attend a traditional public school for a variety of reasons. I am not inherently against Common Core or other attempts to have a national set of content standards. I believe we should have tough high school graduation requirements. There are structural questions I don’t know the answer to, like whether big high schools are better than small ones, or whether the K-8 model is better than the elementary and middle school model. I am a proud member of NEA but I don’t necessarily always agree with them. There are bad teachers out there, and watching them in action is just about the most infuriating thing I have ever experienced.

And on a micro level, I have a lot of ideas about how to improve our schools. Research on the teenage brain soundly backs the need to start middle school and high school later in the morning than the majority of schools in America do. As a whole, every grade from K-12 needs to be spending more time outside and in physical education, both for mental health and improved learning and comprehension in academic content. Research backs that, too. Our brain simply works better with more physical activity and exposure to different environments. We need to teach more inquiry skills instead of memorization, more about the process of asking good questions instead of even necessarily finding the answers to those questions. (This is hard for kids who have been programmed to view only “right” answers as a measurement of success.) But when it does come to answering questions, more time needs to be spend on media and information literacy. (See this horrifying study of students’ ability to tell fake news from real news.) I believe all content levels need to incorporate literacy and writing skills into their curriculum. I’ve seen a badass, no-nonsense math teacher do this in a tough middle school: it can be done.

But honestly, when you appoint people to lead our education department who have never even spent time in a classroom as a teacher, I don’t think those types of things even enter their minds. This is the thing that honestly bothers me most about DeVos. The most common complaint teachers have about those in power above them is that they’ve been away from the classroom for too long. Sometimes even as low down in the education hierarchy as the building principal, it’s clear that they care too much about what parents want, how they present themselves to the community, and endless time spent on “data” and “management” that eventually they have little knowledge or passion about what actually happens in the classroom or what kids really care about or need. Part of this isn’t their fault; because of things like NCLB, they are pressured to spend time on a lot of that bullshit instead of children. But a principal or superintendent or state education official that has at least spent some time at the head of a class full of rowdy, curious, difficult, and wonderful children has the possibility of sitting down, remembering those children, and focusing again on what matters.

DeVos doesn’t have that experience. Bill and Melinda Gates don’t have that experience. They just don’t. So they can only see things from a macro and political level. So let’s go to that level.

At the basest level, dismantling our public education system is wrong because it is democratically and morally wrong. I have fierce pride in a few fine American institutions, and I believe the destruction of any of them is a threat to our existence, or at least our relevant existence. I rank them as such:

1. Public schools

2. Public libraries

3. National parks

There are more, obviously (public transit, hospitals, public defenders, etc.) but I really, really like those three. Public schools and libraries are the foundation of equal opportunity in our nation, from the 1700s through today. Even if you are homeless, these people will take you in. You have just as much of a right to enjoy these public spaces as any billionaire, and you have access to the same amount of materials and resources.

And the idea of a charter school lottery for poor black kids in big, poor cities? Of some lucky kids getting the “prize” of going to a new exciting charter school while the rest get stuck back in the “bad” school? Regardless of whether those evaluations of either school are in fact accurate, you’re automatically changing the equity of a guaranteed public education in America just by the process. Reformers tout the value of “choice,” but even using that word is antithetical to what our public education system should be. We are guaranteed to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) by law. The “choice” for all of our children should be the same.

But let’s talk about the dichotomy that vouchers and charters set up, the bad school vs. the good school. Ever since the publication of A Nation At Risk in the 1980s, and particularly in the post-NCLB era, the only thing politicians and Americans seem to know for sure is that our schools suck. Our public education system is broken. We are in a crisis.

Here’s the secret: This is a lie. Data supports that it is a lie.

I’m currently reading Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch, and she dismantles this myth well, as well as where it comes from. She explains:

“What the critics seldom acknowledge is that our schools have changed as our society has changed. Some who look longingly to a golden age in the past remember a time when the schools educated only a small fraction of the population.”

This small fraction not only means white people, but also able people. This golden age of education that many Republicans look to longingly doesn’t include mentally or physically disabled people. Special education laws that guaranteed every student a right to education didn’t come into being until the 1970s, strengthened by laws such as IDEA in the 1990s. There is a reason public education is so expensive, and a lot of it has to do with special ed--providing opportunities for our most vulnerable populations costs a lot of money. Similarly, Title IX didn’t guarantee girls equality in education and school-related programs until 1972. This imaginary golden age of education in the past also didn’t include English Language Learners. These are populations that charter schools are often not equipped to deal with, financially or professionally.

Thinking about it this way, it starts to make sense that traditionalists on the far right see our public schools as an abomination because our public schools are so vastly different than the ones they grew up in. Different, and beautiful. This video, made this year by students at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon celebrating its diversity made me cry:

But it’s apparently that kind of diversity that makes Republicans scared because it continues the narrative. Our increased diversity is ruining our culture, our economy, and our schools--even when all evidence points to the opposite. (Not totally related, but I also strongly believe that our strong union makes Republicans haaaaate us.)

Despite the diversity our schools now handle, high school graduation rates and college attendance rates, especially for minorities and people of color, are higher than ever before. Dropout rates are lower than ever before. Even teenage pregnancy is on the decline! Ravitch also notes that even more people would be attending college if it didn’t cost so much, which I can tell you is absolutely true from working with high school seniors directly, and which is a whole ‘nother topic for another day.

In relation to how our schools are apparently dumbing our students down, as often goes the failing schools narrative, Ravitch also notes:

“Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now. If they are still in doubt, I invite them to go to the NAEP Web site and review the questions in math and science for eighth-grade students.”

I can also tell you from personal experience working with middle and high school students: THIS IS FO’ SURE TRUE. I feel like a fool when I try to help them with their math or science homework. Sometimes this is because all of that information has flown out of my head since high school, but often it is because they are working on challenging, interesting, complex stuff.

I’m also a big fan of Jonathan Kozol. Read any of his books and you will know that despite the gains I just flouted, a lot of our schools do suck, by certain measures. I have another book sitting on my shelf that is legit called Our Schools Suck. But there are proven reasons about why these schools suck--and also proven solutions--and neither the reasons nor the solutions are even close to anywhere on Betsy DeVos’s or other privatization advocates’ or politicians’ radars. Because they aren’t pretty. They’re messy and complex. The reformers call them “excuses.”

The reasons are this:

1. Poverty

2. Segregation

3. Inadequate funding

Segregation in public schools is on the rise--worse than it was in 1968. (Good long read: This ProPublica report from Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Segregation Now.) Integration was the central theme of a series of excellent episodes of This American Life this year that won a Peabody Award. If you haven’t listened, you should. It argues that integration is a proven method of improving schools yet no one wants to talk about it.

And politicians and education reformers are DEFINITELY over talking about poverty. We haven’t talked honestly about poverty since Lyndon Johnson.

Yet if schools have adequate funding, they can have all of the following, all of which have been proven to increase test scores and higher learning:

1. Small class sizes

2. Electives, including the arts, foreign language, music, and physical education

3. Libraries with certified teacher-librarians

All of these things are so important. In addition to having a structurally sound and functioning building (which a lot of inner city schools don’t have), these three things are so. important. I’ll be waiting to see what Betsy DeVos says about any of them.

Education is not perfect. There are school districts that are a mess, there are bad teachers, there are scary and violent schools. But the majority of on-the-ground reporting proves again and again that the teachers at those “bad schools” care more about their students than teachers anywhere else in the planet, often devoting more of their personal lives to those kids than is healthy. And in places like Chicago, even an underfunded public school is often the safest, most secure place a child can be. The six hours they spend there can help save their lives and give them at least one adequate meal a day.

To abandon all that, when there are proven solutions, to give up on making our system better and throwing it all instead to an untested, unregulated, profit-driven world can only result in chaos. It will result in less equity than ever before, increasing the social divide that already clearly exists in our country. And I am scared of it.

I do believe there are education reformers and charter advocates that truly, deeply care about children. With Betsy DeVos and her like, though, it’s pretty clear that they care mostly about their children--she never dared to send her own children to a scary PUBLIC SCHOOL. It’s clear she cares a lot about Christian kids. But our laws give us a mandate to educate all children--all of them. And guess what? It’s fucking hard. Schools aren’t businesses. You can’t hire an outside CEO to shake things up and turn things around. Schools work because teachers come in every day and teach. Sometimes they yell when they shouldn’t and sometimes they say the wrong thing and sometimes they cry on the way home from work. But they come back the next day and try again. They talk to kids every single day. If you don’t know what that entails, everything that goes into a day in the life of a child at school, you’ll never know what the hell you’re doing.

The good thing.

Yeah, that bad thing was REAL long, so for the good I’ll keep it short. New Jersey is on its way to becoming the first state to ban the declawing of cats!

This may seem like a small thing, but declawing is REAL cruel, guys. And one thing this election has taught me is that we have to be watching what our states are doing, and cherishing their wins. (Like I’ve said to friends, this election is almost making me a Republican, but like back when they actually cared about stuff Republicans are supposed to care about! STATES’ RIGHTS Y’ALL!)

Sure, if someone in New Jersey really wanted to declaw their cats, they could still drive to New York or Pennsylvania or anywhere really and find someone to mutilate and traumatize their poor animal. But this sends a message and sets a precedent for other states to hopefully follow suit, and it gives veterinarians more license to truly push their clients about the cruelty of the practice. And New Jersey is a small but densely populated state. There are a lot of cats this is going to help protect.

Small wins! We have to celebrate the small wins.

#education #betsy devos #diane ravitch #cat declawing #new jersey #one bad thing #one good thing #education reform #roosevelt high school

Absolutely anyone who has declawed a cat/endorses doing so:

Please tell me about the aftermath/benefits.

If you do NOT endorse it, please don’t message; I’ve read too many horror stories and am now seeking evidence in the PRO column, thank you.

#words #cat declawing

I NEED HELP, PLEASE READ

So I got a new cat a few weeks ago. She's two months old and has razor sharp nails.

My mom bought new couches recently and now Mona (my cat) isn't allowed on the couch but does so anyways (which led to tiny holes in our leather seats.) My sister said I either declaw her or get rid of her.

I obviously don't want to declaw her because: its painful to her; she can get an infection

But here's why I think I should: I have two nephews on the way and I don't want her clawing at them but I also want them to be able to play with her; she's my very own first official pet so I don't want to give her away after wanting a cat for so long; to save my mothers horrible couches

I need help making this decision. It's all I've been researching for the past week and I know how painful it will be but I want to keep her but I also don't want to put her through something like that. Please help?

#cat declawing #help me please #I don't know what to do