i certainly got the sense that the conversation was going in the
direction of "shouldn't we just put cats with the smallest disability
to sleep" which is something which would have got me posting away
furiously in anger. I woudl then have to ask why we don't put humans
to sleep permamanantly when they become blind/deaf/paralysed etc of
anyone who supported this abhorrent idea, as to me it is the same.

although the life of a cat is to me just as precious as that of a
human (maybe even more so; how many cats are as malicious as humans,
how many have contributed as extensively to the destruction of our
planet as humans?) and as such i would not hear of such an outrageous
proposition, there are some differences as has been outlined already
by previous posters. Cats do not dwell on the past, they do nto have
the same capacity for language which is required for this and they do
not consciously miss a sense once it has gone, they just adapt as
though nothing has happened. We have not yet established whether this
cat has been blind from birth or not yet (or have we?) in which case
it would not know what it is missing, much like a human who has been
blind from birth, which obviously will have an effect on what is going
on here.

I think we must put our on dependancy on sight onto cats without
realising that they in fact have a 6th sense whereby they 'taste'
smells using the jacobson organ in the roof of the mouth, which may
also come into play much more strongly when they lose another sense. I
wonder if you could talk to a cat and tell it that humans do not have
this ability to taste the air whether the cat might not pity us and
think that we must have such a poor quality of life for not having
this extra sense!

something you must understand before postign to this group is that the
majority of people here are very pro-cat welfare and may have or have
had cats which have been rescued from shelters and quite literally
snatched back from the jaws of death where they had been taken purely
because their previous owners considered them to be unsuitable,
undesirable, substandard, or unlovable purely because of a minor
disability such as blindness or in some cases because the cat did not
match the wallpaper or the family got 'bored' of it (that still does
my head in, who says the cat did not get bored of the family a long
time before?). Therefore any slight hint that a cat should be disposed
of simply because it has a minor disability or is not picture perfect
in someone's eyes is going to raise a wave of outrage here amongst
people who choose to fill their lives and their homes with such feline
'outcasts', and understandably so.

anyway my own outcast is demanding attention so i must go and attend
to her needs for fuss and adoration.
bookie

ps, another top tip, declawing is not exactly popular here either
before you go down that road too