Ordinances that boldly go where no liberal legislation has gone before are a hallowed convention of San Francisco government, and as SF Weekly went to press, the latest in a long history of such measures appeared poised for approval by the Board of Supervisors. The law in question would revise the city's health code to prohibit onychectomy, or the declawing of cats. San Francisco would be one of a small handful of U.S. cities with such a ban; last week, the proposed ordinance was unanimously approved by the supervisors' City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee.
In the debate surrounding the legislation, declawing has been portrayed as a cruel and unnecessary procedure outlawed by much of the civilized world. Supporters of the ban claim that declawing is already illegal in many countries, most of them in Europe, putting onychectomy — along with the death penalty and a lack of universal health care — in that class of barbarisms by which Americans like to distinguish ourselves from our Continental cousins. The ordinance itself states that declawing is illegal in 25 countries, including the United Kingdom.
There's no doubt that declawing is a grisly business. Intended to protect sensitive furniture or scratch-prone pet owners, declawing actually involves amputating the endmost bone segment of the feline equivalent of fingers; imagine lopping off all your own digits above the last joint, and you'll get the idea. But critics say San Francisco's declawing ban is more rigid and less — well, enlightened — than similar laws passed in those enlightened European nations.
Take the Council of Europe's 1987 Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals, which prohibits declawing, except in cases where the procedure can be performed "for the benefit of any particular animal." By contrast, the San Francisco ordinance contains a narrower exemption, permitting declawing for "a therapeutic purpose" — i.e., a cat's medical needs. Dave Weisman of the Dax Foundation, a private charity that donates to animal causes, says this would prevent local vets from declawing cats whose owners threaten to euthanize them or send them to the pound if those pesky nails can't be removed.
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who introduced the declawing legislation, doesn't buy it. (The debate over the legislation was notable for a rare public cat impression from Mirkarimi when he presented the bill: "Mr. Kitty? ... Meow meow ... they took my claws away and I don't have any knuckles.") He said the feared situation in question — an owner "figuratively holding a gun to the head of the cat and the veterinarian" — was dismissed as a red herring by most of the veterinary professionals he consulted. "We were concerned that this would have unintended consequences," he said. Mirkarimi also noted that pet owners that desperate to have their cats declawed could simply travel outside city limits to do so.
Meow meow. What's that, Mr. Kitty? You feel like a trip to San Rafael?
