Last summer (2006), one of our two cats died. Josey was a big, lovable mush of a tabby with big blue eyes, a shy disposition, a bit of a bladder problem and no front claws. We adopted her as an adult after her previous owner (the one who’d had her declawed) had given her up as impossible to live with due to her issues with peeing outside of the box.

Sweating, swearing and crying, I buried her under our mulberry tree one very hot day late in June. While we were all saddened by her death, it was not unexpected: she was quite old and we found out about three weeks before she died that she had a tumor on her liver. This was enough time for the kids to get used to the idea that she was sick and not going to get better. When she finally did die, the kids were luckily not at home so I was able to deal with her corpse and break them the news gently.

I’ve always liked having cats, and we’d all gotten accustomed to having more than one around. The thing that was the greatest comfort to the kids was my suggestion that after Josey died, we could get a kitten. We waited until the end of the summer, after our return from vacation, and then paid a visit to the city’s animal shelter.

The shelter was a clean but depressing place. There were shelves and shelves of cats in cages, most of them pretty scruffy looking. We had to walk through the adult cats room before getting to the kittens. There were plenty of kittens available for adoption as well. The caregiver informed me that they were having a sale on kittens. “It’s a TWO-FUR”. I thought she must have been joking, but no. She was serious. Two kittens for the price of one.

Just seeing the rows and rows of kittens, my girls and I felt compelled. We can’t just get one. The second one is free, anyway, Mama! Pleeeeeeaaase?

The first one was a little black and white kitten, about two months old. We patted her. We cooed. She snuggled. A definite winner, if a bit wheezy and runny at the eyes.

I told the caregiver, we want this black and white kitten, and she handed me their card. Just then, little 3-year-old A pointed to the cat in the cage just next to “our” kitten and said, “What about that one? That one needs a home too? Can’t we just pet her?” A fluffy brown lanky, slightly older kitten was released from her prison. We stroked her gently as she tried to leap her way out of my arms, claws extended, and she hoisted herself up and away to the tops of the cages, trying to stage a getaway. The fast acting keeper captured her and returned her to the cage.

By then A and C were both saying, See she wants to get out of here! We have just got to rescue her!

“I’ll take this brown one, too,” I heard myself saying to the caregiver.

“Oh, you want this one? The freaky one?” A shudder ran through my body just then.

“Uh, yes…. please.”

And so, we brought home both kittens and they were cute and small and playful, all the things that kittens should be. The freaky brown one, we named Luna. The black and white one, we named Moonlight (see a theme here?) and once we’d nursed them back to health and treated them for fleas, all was well.

We did notice certain aggressive tendencies in Luna. She played rough with Moonlight, and absolutely terrorized our old tom cat, Jitterbug (orange and white cat in the oval at right). And the kids soon learned that Luna is NOT a cat to try to carry around; she will NOT tolerate being put in the doll stroller; she does NOT want to learn to take walks in the cat harness and leash. (Moonlight is much more agreeable as long as she was not actually being harmed.) Lastly, we learned that you absolutely should NOT try to pet her when she gets in one of her moods. The hard thing was trying to decipher the mood before she lands you a severe scratch or a naughty little nipping.

Over the course of the last three months, A and C have started asking that I take Luna to a vet and get her claws removed. They feel they’ve tried long enough and they are tired of being attacked. Mind you, the cat doesn’t attack anyone who isn’t trying to touch her first. (Not counting flying insects, beetles, mice, snakes and birds. Oh, and innocent hamsters who are just trying to run inside a wheel in peace) . Generally speaking, Luna may be psycho, but she’s not so aggressive that she harms people without provocation. On the other hand, as far as she’s concerned “provocation” includes things like a simple, gentle pat on the head.

Fast forward about a year from when we adopted the kittens… to yesterday. I’m sitting at my desk, working quietly at the computer. Luna leaps up onto my desk, as all my cats have been known to do, in order to do the important business of placing herself in between my eyes and my computer screen. She’s purring like mad. I reach out and pat her gently and she turns abruptly and scratches me in the face. I yelped, and clapped my hands loudly as a signal to her that it’s not OK to maul me. She skitters off.

It’s these random acts of violence that make her unpopular in this household. I can live with a certain amount of terroristic cat behavior, but my kids are fed up with it. They remember very fondly the gentle soft clawless Josey and miss that docile and loveable lump. Especially near the end of her life, she was very calm and seemed to accept sitting on C’s lap as a comfort.

It’s one of those situations, gentle reader, when my scruples are being tested. It’s cruel to declaw a cat. But is it a mistake to allow a cat to remain living with you, when she claws and bites you and your family? I wish I could understand what this very talkative cat is saying. She has this creepy meow that sounds like she’s saying “Mom”. She repeats herself a lot. I am very fond of her and I can’t agree to have her little paws mutilated, but there is probably a limit to what I’ll tolerate before deciding that she cannot live peacefully with our family.

At this point in time, we are nowhere near that breaking point. What to do if we should ever get to that point? I will have to think about it some more, to try to find a solution.