'[My] husband declawed my cat behind my back and I want a divorce': Woman considers divorcing her husband of 3 years after he declawed her cat for scratching his fancy gaming chair

Mariel Ruvinsky • Writer and Editor

Mar 17, 2025 9:00 AM EDT

Cats are deal-breakers in relationships. If one of us has a cat, then that us and the cat are a package deal, and if you don't want to deal with the cat, then you don't get to deal with us either. It's as simple as that. And we have seen this deal-breaker play out in quite a few relationships at this point. We have seen everything from - boyfriends not being able to handle being 'second' to the cat because of their fragile egos, to boyfriends asking their girlfriends to choose between them and the cat, all the way to one boyfriend calling his girlfriend unhygienic because of the cat that she sometimes kisses on the forehead.

But it's always a boyfriend, not a husband, and it's never quite as bad as what happened with the couple in this story. Usually, by the time you get to the "husband" phase, after having lived with the wife's cat for a while, after having built a relationship with it, then stuff like this doesn't happen. Or it shouldn't happen. You do not go behind your wife's back and hurt her cat… because he scratched your fancy new gaming chair. You just don't.

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Truly, we don't know what we would do in this situation. We want to give the husband the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe he didn't know that what he was doing was wrong… except he clearly knew. If he didn't think it was wrong, he would not have gone behind your back.
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We wholeheartedly understand how the wife would be devastated by this situation. Getting a divorce three years into a marriage is heartbreaking. But if the husband knew that what he was doing was wrong, if he went behind your back and hurt your cat… over a chair, then we can only imagine how he would treat future kids that you might have together.
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via Unsplash / Milada Vigerova

_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}