Bill prohibiting cat declawing in California moves forward in state legislature

Yahoo

09-04-2025

A bill moving through the California Legislature seeks to prohibit anyone besides a veterinarian from declawing a cat.
The bill would allow veterinarians to declaw a cat if it's a 'medically necessary procedure to address an existing or recurring infection, disease, injury, or abnormal condition in the claws, nail bed, or toe bone, which jeopardizes the animal's cat's health,' according to the bill's text.
'Mutilating healthy cats for human convenience is cruel and inhumane,' Assemblymember Alex Lee (D- Milpitas), who authored the bill, said in a statement. 'Cat declawing is a permanent disfiguring surgery that's equivalent to removing a person's fingers at the top knuckle. This is a commonsense bill reinforcing that cat declawing goes against ethical treatment standards for animals.'
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Lee also has two cats, Udon and Soba.
The bill would not allow the procedure to be performed 'for a cosmetic or aesthetic purpose or to make the cat animal convenient to keep or handle.'
Five different efforts to ban the practice in California since 2018 have failed.
According to Lee's office, The American Veterinary Medical Association has discouraged vets from performing the surgeries and states like New York, Maryland, and Massachusetts have also passed bans.
Globally, dozens of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and Switzerland, banned cat declawing.
Locally, in 2003, the city of West Hollywood passed the nation's first legislation to ban cat declawing. Several other California cities have followed since.
Still, not everyone is in favor of the ban.
Christina DiCaro, a lobbyist for the California Veterinary Medical Association who is against the bill, said during a committee hearing that many of the association's members have voluntarily stopped declawing.
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Cal Matters reported that DiCaro's group primarily opposes the bill because vets don't want the Legislature to dictate what practices they can use.
'We suspect that the only reason this language is in the bill is so that animal activists can obtain this information, the names of veterinarians through a public records request, and target our hard-working professionals,' DiCaro told the committee.
The bill passed in the Assembly Business and Professions Committee and is headed to the Appropriations Committee.
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