Do you know how to trim your cat’s claws?

I know, we’re not overly fond of you fooling around with our claws, and so we take off running as soon as we see you with the claw clipper. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need your help in order to keep our claws in good shape and keep us in perfectly healthy, both physically and mentally.

The trick to keeping us still while you’re working on us is to turn our paw care time into a pleasant experience. You may not be familiar with this subject, but that’s why I’m here, to let you in on some little tricks so that you can trim our claws the way it should be done.

Haste makes waste trimming my claws! All us cats must have our claws well cared for to be able to explore the world the way we like to. Cat scratching posts are great for us for grooming our front claws and stretching our muscles, but it’s up to you to keep our claws from not getting too long.

You should turn claw-trimming time into a pleasant time for us. Get us accustomed to it from the time we are little kittens by petting our paws daily, not solely when it comes time to trim our claws. Makes us comfortable lying on your lap on our back, just as if we were a human baby, since that is going to be the ideal claw-trimming position. If you do this between two of you, all the better, one of you petting us throughout the process and the other one trimming our claws.

We have 18 claws! Five on each front foot and four on each back foot. Gently grasp each toe and give us a massage, and when we’re calmed down, lightly press on the paw pad so that the claw will extend out (remember that our claws are retractable, and we usually have them hidden away out of sight).

How much should you trim? Trimming must not affect the vein that runs through the claws, which is readily identifiable by its pink color (if you cat has black claws, this vein will leave a darker trace). If the claw clipper touches this vein, we will bleed and feel pain; so, when in doubt, trim off less and groom us more often.

A nail clipper designed to cut human nails is more than good enough for taking care of our claws, but you can also find specific claw clipping accessories at pet supply stores. After your first go at claw clipping, you will know how to readily pick out which accessory will do best for cutting our claws, from modified scissors to guillotine-style nail clippers.

You should trim our claws every two or three weeks, and the trimming process should not take longer than 10 minutes. Otherwise, we’ll get out of patience, and you won’t have any other alternative than to wait a few days to try again.

It’s important that you keep calm and not shout at us. The only thing you will get out of shouting is for us to be more scared of claw-trimming and the entire process being much more of a hassle.  Take heart, humans! It’s not as hard as they say!