Feeding & Nutrition

Mochi is a Sphynx, which means he has no fur and roughly the same number of opinions as a cat with fur, just louder and delivered at higher volume because there's nothing to muffle the indignation. For the first month he would not drink. Not from the ceramic bowl I bought at the pet store, not from the stainless one I borrowed from the kitchen, not even from the wide shallow dish I ordered after reading that cats hate their whiskers touching the sides of a narrow bowl and will avoid the water rather than deal with the weird pressure on their face.

He'd pad over, sniff the surface like it might be a trap, and leave without a single lap. I'd find him instead licking condensation off the bathroom mirror after a shower, which is both unsanitary and a genuinely weird thing to watch a mostly hairless cat do, his pink tongue moving across the glass with focused dedication. The water in his bowls was fresh, changed twice a day. The bowls were clean, rinsed of any soap film. He just wasn't interested, and a cat that won't drink is a cat you worry about, because their kidneys are unforgiving and dehydration sneaks up fast.

I went through three bowls in as many weeks, a small personal inventory of failure. A heavy stoneware one he tipped over just to prove a point, water across the floor, him sitting smug in the dry spot. A glass one he ignored completely, wouldn't even approach. A tilted silicone one he drank from exactly once, the night I bought it, then abandoned the next morning like it had betrayed him. I was about to call it a personality quirk and accept a life of mirror-licking, with all the germs that implies, when a friend who breeds Sphynx sent a single line after I complained: "Get a fountain. They like moving water. Mine ignored still water for a year."

Moving water did it

The fountain arrived, a small ceramic one with a quiet pump, and I filled it, expecting another failure and already composing the text to my friend about how her advice had not panned out. Mochi approached, watched the stream for a long second with his head tilted, and drank. Properly drank, head down, for a count I could actually tally, ten seconds, twelve, long enough that I stopped worrying. He's been on the fountain since, and the bathroom mirror has gone unlicked, which the whole household considers a win.

Why a fountain and not a bowl? Cats are built to distrust still water. In the wild, standing water is the stuff that goes bad, a pond that sits collects bacteria and rot, while moving water stays cleaner and cooler, and that instinct sits deep in them even after ten thousand years of domestication. Sphynx in particular run warm, with no fur to hold heat in or keep it out, and they drink more than furred cats to regulate that, so a picky one feels the gap fast and suffers for it sooner. The sound and motion of a fountain reads as fresh, and the constant circulation keeps it from going stale in a way a bowl can't match, especially in a warm apartment where a still bowl turns tepid by noon.

I clean it every few days, the pump and the reservoir pulled apart and rinsed, because a fountain only works if the water stays clear and the flow stays strong. A slimy fountain is worse than no fountain, a warm broth no cat will touch, and the filter needs swapping on schedule or the whole thing defeats its own purpose. The cost was modest, less than the three bowls combined once you add the glass one I never returned, and it ended a problem I'd been overthinking for a month.

Mochi still has opinions. He complains about the temperature of the room, the timing of his meals, the fact that the sun moved and his favorite chair is now in shadow, and I've learned to read all of it. But he drinks now, steadily, from the moving water he trusts, which means his kidneys are happier than they were that first month when I was measuring his trips to the mirror. A hairless cat with good hydration is a cat who'll be around to complain for a long time, and that's the deal I signed up for.

There was a power outage last winter that killed the fountain pump for a day, and I watched him circle the dead basin and finally, reluctantly, drink from the ceramic bowl I'd left as backup, the one he'd refused for a month. When the power came back and the stream kicked on, he went straight to it like the bowl had never existed. It told me the preference is real and not just habit, that moving water is what his body asks for, not what he learned. I keep the backup bowl filled anyway, because a hairless cat with no water for a day is a risk I won't take, fountain or not, and the cleaning routine now includes a spare pump I learned to swap without flooding the floor.