Cat Hydration Situation

After taking some newsletter-writing webinars about “define what your newsletter is” and also a bunch of people unsubscribing from my currently ill-defined newsletter¹ , I have decided to try this: the Sunday/Monday posts will be about some literary topic, like this past Monday’s spring season preview, some sort of craft post, a book review, something about my own work, guest-posters about a writerly thing, etc. Thursdays, for the moment, will remain chaos. Dialogues with Mark where we bicker about nonsense, stuff about my cats, guest posts from Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier about what her dogs are thinking, guest posts from other people about TBD, recipes, memories, reviews of buses (this post is forthcoming), etc., etc. One non-chaos post per week is as much as I can manage. This is a compromise; we’ll see how it goes.

Enjoying my Thursday opportunity to be chaotic, I will take this opportunity to tell you about how my cats drink water: badly. Evan pretty much cannot drink water without knocking some of it on the floor. There is almost water all over our kitchen floor and I have taken to keeping a bowl of water in the shower when no one is actively showering (and sometimes when I am) so that cats who knock over their water can do the least damage.

The reason for so much water-knocking-over is a natural feline instinct gone bizarrely awry. Cats by nature prefer moving water over still, because still water could be stagnant water and stagnant water traps dirt and disease. Moving water is fresher, less likely to make them sick. This ancient self-preservation instinct is why cats will seek out a dripping tap and, sometimes, beg you to turn on the tap so they can drink from it—they know that’s the freshest water in the house. My cats will both run to drink from the bowl if they see me pouring water into it, because they know that the pouring water is clean and fresh. This is a smart, safety-first instinct.

However, Evan’s instinct has come slightly unmoored from reality in that his tiny brain believes that water will become safer if he moves it. He will look at a water sitting in his dish and then kick it, watching it splashing and sloshing until convinced that it is nice and fresh, then drink—by which point, most of it is out of the bowl onto the floor. We have been buying him heavier and heavier bowls but he’s pretty strong, and he can kick most of them pretty well.

“What that cat needs is a cat fountain!” you might be thinking. If you have no idea what that is, it’s an electric fountain that constantly circulates and aerates the water, keeping it both moving and fresh, to a cat’s delight. Seems like a solution to Ev’s problem, doesn’t it? Well, they HAD a cat fountain, and they did love it. Evan loved it to excess though, drinking himself sick on multiple occasions and eventually eating enough of the fountain than it became a hazard and had to be taken away. And then it was back to bowls, a problem we have not yet solved. If you know where to get a small (cat sized) very heavy bowl that is also not expensive and not breakable, please let me know, as I would like to buy several.

As you may recall, we have a second cat who figures in fewer stories because she is less bizarre. Tiny Alice, only six pounds, after years of drinking normally while watching her brother kick violently at the water bowl, has lately started to imitate the alpha cat and try to kick at the bowls too. Mark says he has seen her actually succeed in kicking her dish, but she wasn’t strong enough to move it or slosh the water at all. I have not seen her even make contact—all her kicks in my sight have gone extremely wide. It is adorable but a little sad. She just wants to be like her big brother, hot mess that he is, but she is a hot mess of a different stripe, extremely frail and with poor aim.

Please send advice on how to solve this issue, bowl purchase suggestions, and/or mops.

^{1 We don’t know for certain that they unsubscribed because Rose-coloured is ill-defined. There are a lot of other problems with this newsletter, including, I’m just discovering, I don’t know how to hyperlink footnotes.}