How to Declaw a Cat | eHow.com

The eHow.com article on How to Declaw a Cat was deleted by the owners of the site. This is because of the general outcry against it by decent minded people who posted critical comments. I think I contributed to that outcry when Ruth (AKA Kattaddorra) showed it to me (thanks Ruth).

I believe that many of the good people at PoC made comments to the article criticizing it. It was a basic, crude article. It was written by a person who had no sensibility towards our cat companions. It was dangerous in its inadvertent promotion of declawing.

And I would like to praise, if I may, the lady who runs the ExclusivelyCats Blog. She pointed out to me that the eHow.com article had been deleted. And she makes a very valid and important general observation about the Internet.

It panders to the modern cult of dumbing down. The large sites churning out web pages by the thousand, which incidentally, Google.com promotes in ranking them highly in search engine results pages (SERPs), tend to dumb down topics that simply cannot be dumbed down. Sometimes the quality is nothing short of appalling.

When you dumb down serious and important subjects such as declawing, you trivialize it and you send out the wrong message. In doing so you indirectly encourage it.

To encourage declawing is to encourage all that is wrong about cat caretaking. There is a lot of good in cat caretaking in the United States, but declawing can never be good.

There is power in the people on the internet. The basic motto is: Don't get sucked in to reading rubbish just because Google thinks it is good. Google.com does not get it right all the time. Please think critically.

Note: as at 15th May 2012, a Google.com search still finds eHow.com article but the article is not their. It takes a long time for Google's search engine to genuinely delist a web page.

Update 21-May-2012: the article has been replaced with: "How to Care for a Newly Declawed Cat"