Cat Declawing Is Illegal — But Only in 7 States, Not All of America

For decades, declawing — clinically called onychectomy — was treated as a routine American veterinary procedure, performed on an estimated quarter or more of all domestic cats. The surgery involves amputating the last bone of each toe, analogous to severing a human finger at the top knuckle. Cats were typically declawed to stop furniture scratching or to protect immunocompromised owners from scratch wounds. The tide began turning as veterinary research accumulated evidence linking declawing to chronic foot pain, litter-box avoidance, increased biting, aggression, and mobility issues. New York fired the first legislative shot in July 2019, when Governor Andrew Cuomo signed S.5532B, making it the first U.S. state to ban the practice. Maryland followed in 2022, then Washington D.C. in 2023, Virginia in 2024, and Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California all enacted bans in 2025 — doubling the number of banning states in a single year. California's AB 867, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 9, 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, added the nation's most populous state to the list. Separately, more than a dozen cities — including Denver, Austin, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and eight California cities — had already enacted local bans. At the professional level, the three largest U.S. veterinary chains (VCA, Banfield, BluePearl, collectively over 2,000 locations) voluntarily stopped performing elective declawing in January 2020, and the American Animal Hospital Association updated its 2025 accreditation standards to prohibit non-therapeutic declawing at accredited practices. Internationally, at least 42 countries have already banned the procedure, including the UK (2006) and most of Europe under the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals.