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Or you can get different furniture. Some cats won’t claw leather. A tight fabric like chintz doesn’t unravel like wool, or offer a good hold. The modern unstructured things that are basically piles of pillows feel unstable to a cat, as if they might fall on his head, as well they might.

Or you can get the cat declawed.

Elizabeth Keifer in Wholly Cats writes that her veterinarian heartily approves of declawing, which, he says, gives neither pain nor psychic distress. Indeed, the cat never misses its claws at all, and its pads, he says, become so callused afterward that it has no trouble climbing trees.

He doesn’t explain why the pads should get callused; a cat’s claws are retractable, and the cat walks on the same pads before and after the operation. Nor does he explain how to climb a tree with callused pads. Would he care to put on some stout hard-surfaced mittens and scramble up to demonstrate?

A friend of mine had a little black cat named Siam and needed to leave it for the summer with her parents, but they insisted on having it declawed first, front and back, perhaps with visions of its standing on its head to slice upholstery from the rear. The next time I saw my friend, her parents, alas, were still unsatisfied. Siam cried night and day and kept them awake; she bit and chewed frantically at her paws so they didn’t heal, and everywhere she went she left little rosebuds of blood on the precious upholstery and rugs.

Patricia P. Widmer, in Pat Widmer’s Cat Book, recommends, almost insists on, declawing as a basic routine procedure like neutering, adding parenthetically that her cats are somehow managing to destroy her furniture anyway, but that fore-and-aft declawing is necessary to keep the cat from scratching people. I’m not sure I’d want to keep a cat that wanted in its heart to scratch me, front claws or back. Widmer doesn’t mention trees, but she seems to live in Manhattan and probably, like most New Yorkers, finds it hard to entertain the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere.

My excellent vet says the world is full of cats kept locked away from normal life in kitchens or basements or bedrooms out of deference to the living room furniture, and claws are a reasonable price to pay for release.

My Persian Barney has been declawed. A cattery stud for his first ten years, he lost his claws when the cattery closed and the owner planned to take him to an apartment full of new chairs and couches. On an impulse, she gave him to me instead.

We lived in the city together and he learned a whole world of new things, refuting the scholarly theory that cats can learn new things during only a few brief months in their first year. He rejoiced in his retirement, and in having a person of his own.

After a couple of years, life being unpredictable, we found ourselves in the country instead. In the new place there was another cat, and Barney watched Sadie, and learned from her to sit on laps and ask for tidbits from the table.

Outdoors, for a clawless cat, was dangerous, so I kept him company on small excursions to the back porch. One day we sat there and watched Sadie climb up the willow tree, sit on a branch for a while, and climb back down.

Barney trembled all over. Racial memory sprang to life in this twelve-year-old cat who had never in his life before seen a tree up close. He whisked down the porch steps and trotted across the lawn with his tail on high and fluttering like a helmet plume. He put his paws on the tree and gave a little spring.

Using his clawed back feet for push, he got about three feet up before he toppled and fell over on his back on the ground; I heard the thump.

He wasn’t hurt, but the cat that came back across the lawn was a different cat, and smaller than the one who had rushed to climb a tree at his ancestors’ bidding, and his tail dragged in the grass.

Claws are central to a cat, to his ego, his sense of himself and his competence in the world. He sees himself as a creature with claws;