ill preface with this: I haven’t read this article yet, and so I don’t know if they addressed my concerns in it.
I... I have mixed feelings about this. It’s really easy to ban things they don’t like (declawing, cropping, tail docking) but then it brings up some good questions, one regards immunocompromised owners and declawing. And then the second is the official breed standard. I don’t believe that cropped ears/ docked tails are going to be taken out of the official breed standards anytime soon, so now instead of the veterinarian doing them who knows what they’re doing and can do it safely/ humanely, who does it? The breeder? The groomer? I do understand trying to discourage these mutilating actions, but idk if a straight up ban is the best way to go...
I think straight up bans tend to be much more effective than they seem. At some point our profession needs to be able to take a stand against practices that we consider inhumane and I have always been somewhat fascinated by the equivocation I see in arguments against outright bans of certain practices. I see a lot of the "well people will simply do it at home" argument, and while I understand the perspective, I also don't know that I agree with it - as someone who works in humane enforcement, there are tons of things that owners aren't allowed to do at home that they do anyway, but on some level it's okay because we can and do prosecute them for it.
I think the bigger issue is making sure that the law is consistent with the veterinary practices at the time the ban takes effect, but these sorts of things would almost universally fall under some version of practicing without a license and/or causing bodily harm to the animal, which are laws that are generally very consistently in place in most areas.
If we'd like to take a stand against breed standards that we consider inappropriate, well then why not stop performing procedures that allow that breed standard to remain in place? Things rarely change all at once, and for all the people who will complain or try to do things at home, I am sure there are many more who will see the barrier created by our profession itself and not pursue it further than that.
There is a relative paucity of good studies about immunocompromised owners and declawed cats. The CDC doesn't recommend declaws as a method of preventing zoonoses to owners, and frankly I sort of think that you'd have to be a
severely immunocompromised person to be at a serious health risk from an un-declawed cat. There are a few papers indicating that infections with
Bartonella henselae and dermatophytosis are more likely in immunocompromised cat owners (and note that dermatophytosis transmission would have no relation to whether a cat was declawed or not), but current evidence suggests that it's much more effective to screen for a healthy cat in the first place than it is to declaw them, particularly for
Bartonella, where appropriate flea control is a much more important factor for disease prevention than the declaw would be.