We undertook something quite courageous this weekend. After the eye-incident last month, Tim and I decided that clipping Sam's claws couldn't be put off any longer. She had left the smallest little scratch on the crease of my eyelid and, needless to say, it was rather scary to think about what would have happened if she had cut just few centimeters lower.
First a little background knowledge is needed. When we got her, we took Sam to the vet for a routine check-up and asked them to go ahead and clip her claws while she was there. We picked her up later that day and were informed that she had been labeled 'feisty' on her chart... and that they were not able to clip her claws. At the time we thought, "Are you kidding? This sweet little lap cat?!" Since she was so little and she took to her scratching post so well, we didn't really worry about it much and figured the claws would help her defend herself against the dynamic duo, who have a habit of tag-teaming other cats.
Tim and I are pretty experienced as far as clipping claws goes. Sebastian was always clipped about once a month. Mainly this was because he was such a big guy that we thought he could seriously hurt Thomas or Annabelle if he got them pinned down (Thomas and Annabelle were declawed by their previous owner. Declawing is something that Tim and I don't agree with but, in their case, we didn't really have a choice). While Sebastian wasn't exactly thrilled when clipping time came around, he was easily manageable and would mostly just wait for us to finish.
That's not the case with Sam, however. The vet was right; she's a feisty little girl.
Tim's job was to hold her and my job was to do the clipping. In addition to our usual tool, the nail clippers, we added some new weapons to our arsenal: a sweatshirt and clean gardening gloves. Tim put the sweatshirt and gloves on to protect himself from the many pointy objects that protrude from our sweet little lap cat, and then we started the deed.
Sam immediately knew that something was up and turned into a little Tasmanian Devil. She was growling and flipping and moving in ways that I never thought possible. Ultimately we got the job done, but we also got the cold-shoulder afterward.
I'm still amazed that the smallest of all our cats is also the most lethal.
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