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.
We have a varying number of feral cats that are abandoned in our area .. we live pretty far out in the countryside .. and we feed and water those who come by as long as they want to stay. Those remain completely feral, front claws and long snarly teeth .. you know, like a saber-tithed tooger. The oldest we've had here was a female who probably made 10 years or so, and a couple of big .. and I do mean BIG .. males who made it to 13 or so.
I try to tame any kittens that are born on the porch, getting them spayed/neutered, and findings friends and neighbors who are looking for a kitten/cat. It's up to them if they want to declaw them, but, as some have come by to visit our feeding site, most of them are probably indoor/outdoor cats. They still have their claws, but will come up to me and want to be cuddled.
Until we started feeding the local ferals, we had a little bit of a mice problem, but that has gone away (as have the snakes and toads that used to hang around the front porch). I've also seen a decrease in the number of jackrabbits that were digging in the yard.
One thing that I have seen lately that I hadn't seen before: the local bluejays, cardinals, and mocking birds will come onto the porch and eat the cat kibbles out of the feeding bowls. The few times that I've seen one of the older cats try to mess with them, the cat was chased off the porch wailing. Those particular birds don't take any crap off of any of these feral cats.