I guess I should clarify .. only the front claws were removed. All of my cats have never been .. and would never be allowed to be .. outside of the house after declawing.
For decades my parents had a large orange tabby cat that had just the front paws declawed. His previous owner was an elderly friend who had died. He never had any apparent difficulties that we were aware of, other than he wasn't able to shred the furniture. I am not sure exactly how old he was when he died, but my parents had the cat for nearly two decades. It wasn't completely defenseless; when we brought our wienerdog over he would jump up in the air and scratch our little wiener with his back paws. Our dog was terrified of him.
We lived on a small farm and had many cats when I was growing up. We had them partially to keep the rodent population under control because corn, oats, hay and other horse, cow, and pig feed attracts mice and rats especially. So obviously we would not have wanted these cats to be declawed, we fed them, but they worked for a living.
I am very amused by the very obvious hypocrisy of so many cat owners. It is extremely common but irresponsible for owners to let cats who they claim to love roam free in urban areas. The Audubon society estimates that domestic and feral cats kill between “1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds in the lower 48 states every year—more than buildings, vehicles, and poisoning combined.”
http://www.audubon.org/news/cat-owners-turn-blind-eye-pets-violence
My guess is that declawed cats kill basically no birds per year. So despite all the howling from cat owners here about how “cruel” it is for kitties to be declawed, it does prevent a great deal of needless cruelty and violence against birds, squirrels, and other small animals. But I guess the pain and suffering and the needless murder of these cute little fuzzy and feathered animals are not nearly as important as the amusement it provides for domestic cats. ; )
Despite the previous paragraph I do not actually care a lot much one way or the other, since we live in a area that is close to wilderness I have appreciated greatly the rodent control that all the cats used to provide. I say “used to” because we had a group of coyotes who lived in the neighborhood until they ate all the cats that were being allowed to roam free and then moved on to another neighborhood. Kitty claws are actually not a credible threat to coyotes. For a while nearly every phone pole was converted into some sort of shrine with all the missing cat posters. So this one of the primary reasons I say it is irresponsible to let your beloved family cat roam free.
When I was a kid I do not remember one of our “farm cats” living to a ripe old age. Most of them were eventually killed either by larger predators or run over by cars. Such is the life of a “farm cat”, but how responsible is that really for a beloved domestic cat. The only cat that my parents ever had that lived to be really old was their declawed house cat.
I just do not believe cat declawing is the type of thing that the government has any business regulating. It is something that cat owners should be able to decide for themselves.