I am a little miffed with Denali right now, but I doubt it compares to how upset my mother is with her. My mother actually threatened to have her de-clawed! I know she’d never do it, but it shows you how upset she was. So what happened? Let me back up a bit and start at the beginning.

My mother switched out her purse a while back and stored her favorite black leather purse in the closet. Today we heard some digging around and things falling in the closet. We gathered around the door with only one thought on our minds “do we have rats?”. With no small amount of trepidation we opened the closet door, only to be greeted with the sight of Denali proudly sharpening her claws on something. That something was my mother’s favorite purse. *cringes* Wow, and I thought I cussed a lot when I was upset. Both Denali and I wisely ran and hid as the impromptu fireworks display went off.

Denali wisely retreated to her bed and did her best to look sorry, but as you can tell by the picture on the right, sh’d been sharpening her claws on that purse for quite some time now. You see all of those funny litle bumps and what not? That’s where she’s been sharpening her claws. I normally trim the girls’ claws, since I’m against de-clawing, but in all honesty we’d never really had that bad of a problem with the cats sharpening their claws. Occasionally Isis tries it on our shoes, but after a scolding that’s the end of it.

Here lately though, Denali’s gotten really bad. She likes to stand on her back paws and stretch up to sharpen her claws on the computer chair, while I’m sitting on it no less! She’ll do the same to my bed, the couch, and she likes to sharpen her claws on the doors and corners of cabinets now. I really don’t understand why she’s started this so badly and I think it might have something to do with the fact that those two claws she lost came back in as tiny stubs and won’t grow anymore. Maybe she’s trying to force them to somehow grow back? Poor baby. It looked like one of them, and then both of them might make a full return at one point, but they just came back as stubbed claws so I can’t help but wonder if this is the reason.

I was looking into buying some new cat furniture here soon for the girls, but after today I think I’m going to bump up the purchase asap. I’m looking for something that will give the girls a nice play to sleep and hide but will allow Denali to sharpen her claws to her heart’s content. Any suggestions?