easy answer. no.

What's best is to trim her nails and teach her to scratch on posts
or those cardboard scratch pads.  Cats can be trained and that
is a much better alternative than cutting off their fingers.  Declawing
is really "amputation".  It sounds like they just pull off a finger nail
but they actually cut off the finger at the knuckle.  It can cause
trauma in the animal but more than that it is completely unneccessary.

Good luck with your Kitty.  They are really fun at that age.

AG

Declawing is wrong.
You should do the following get a  scratching post and scratching pad and train
the cat to use it, trim claws, and if that fails look into getting soft paws
which are caps which fit over the claws.
Cats sometimes will hold on to you lightly with their claws for support when
being held. Also they might accidentally scratch litely during play but this is
normal and is part of being a cat owner.

Ed

"Michael Balarama" mbalar@ev1.net writes

Please don't even consider it. The procedure is really an amputation of the
first portion of the claw...totally unnecessary.  With some training, cats can
be trained NOT to scratch. Also, look into softpaws..the humane solution.  If
your daughter is not old enough to play responsibly with the cat, then you need
to supervise the activity.  Thanks (from the cat) for asking! <g

Declawing often causes the cat to have other behavioral problems (biting, for
example). So, it creates more problems than it solves. As others suggested,
it's easy to teach the cat to stop scratching.

Dik

I agree with the other postings - as a volunteer at the humane society
and an animal rights advocate, I strongly urge against declawing your
pet...unless it is the absolute only thing preventing you from keeping
and caring for your cat.  It is, in my opinion, a painful and
inhumane, procedure to put your cat through, and it can create a new
set of behavioral issues.

It sounds to me like the issue is less relevant to the cat's claws
than it is to the cat's behavior.  Scratching and jumping might be a
sign of misdirected aggression.  I am not sure of the age of your
daughter, or the nature of the relationship between her and your cat,
but I would recommend re-directing your cat's aggression to behaviors
that are more tolerable.

First, I would definitely recommend training your cat to use a
scratching post.  At 10 months, I would not recommend using catnip to
encourage the scratching post use - I have read that giving catnip to
a kitten can make it immune to the effects of catnip as an adult cat.
Instead, I would try other forms of reward for using the scratching
post - praise, treats, etc.  Anytime that your cat is scratching
somewhere where it should not, say "no" and move the cat to the
scratching post so that it eventually associates the scratching
activity to the post.

Secondly, I would evaluate the circumstances leading to the jumping.
Is your daughter doing anything to elicit the jumping - teasing,
inviting, etc.?  One of the worst behavior issues that we see with
aggressive animal playing is using hands as a "toy" for the animal.
Perhaps your daughter could try playing with the cat with a
feather-on-a-stick, or something that takes the "play" away from her
body.

With animals, it is most effective to encourage positive behaviors
than to punish negative behaviors.  And sometimes it is just best to
not acknowledge poor behaviors because they may be a ploy to simply
get attention...if you give the attention, then it only encourages and
enforces the poor behavior.  So when your cat is jumping and
scratching, you may need to teach your daughter to simply walk away.
It's difficult, because our human reaction is often to "get the last
word", but with animals you sometimes have to out-smart them, not
out-argue them.

I hope you find some of this advice helpful.  Good luck!