Feeding & Nutrition

Mabel is fourteen and set in her ways, which mostly means she ignores anything new and judges everything old. Last spring she stopped drinking. Not all at once, just less, then a saucer that sat full for two days, then the look of a cat who has decided the water is beneath her. I panicked in the quiet way you panic when the animal you love is slowly doing less of the things that keep her alive, and you are the only one who noticed.

Cats are built to get water from food, which is why the dry-kibble-only life worries me now in a way it did not when she was young. A cat can drift into dehydration without ever seeming thirsty, and by the time you notice the slack skin and the tired eyes, you are already behind. I switched her to wet food years ago, but that week even the gravy went untouched, and I ran out of explanations that did not end at the clinic with a drip and a bill.

The thing that worked was shamefully simple. I warmed a little plain chicken broth, no salt, no onion, nothing a cat's liver would ever thank me for hiding in there, and poured it over a spoon of her food. She sniffed, then she ate, then she drank the rest from the bowl like it had been her idea. The warmth carries the smell further, I think, and an old cat with a dull nose will eat what she can find before she eats what she should, which is a sentence I wish I had understood sooner.

For two days I hovered. The saucer filled, the saucer emptied, and I started to breathe again, the way you do when the small thing you feared turns out to be fixable with a warm pan and a little patience. Mabel acted as if none of it had happened, which is the cat gift, the ability to recover without ever admitting there was a problem, and to judge you for having worried about one.

What I do now instead of guessing

A second water bowl in a room she actually uses, not the one I thought looked nice. A dripping tap she can reach, because moving water beats still water for most cats and she is most of them. Broth over her meals twice a week whether she needs it or not, because prevention is cheaper than a drip and a night in the waiting room where the lights are wrong and the other animals cry.

I also stopped trusting the automatic feeder to tell me anything. The dish looked full, so I assumed she was fine, and the dish tells you nothing about what went in the cat. Now I eyeball the level, I note the wet-food lump, and when either drops for a day I act instead of waiting for a worse sign. Mabel did not ask me to be this attentive. She just stopped drinking until I was, and the lesson stuck harder than any she meant to teach.

She is fine now. Rounder, slower, louder about the broth, and allergic to my tone when I remind guests not to feed her their scraps. The broth trick is not medicine. It is a nudge, the same as a warm hand on a cold morning, and for an old cat who would rather nap than drink, sometimes the nudge is the whole difference between a quiet week and a scary one that ends with a phone call you did not want to make.

I keep a carton of low-salt stock in the fridge now, next to the good stuff for people, and no one in the house is allowed to confuse the two. Mabel gets hers warm, I get mine hot, and we sit at the counter like two old ladies with a routine. The vet said her numbers looked better at the last visit. I said I knew. I did not say it was the broth. Some credit you keep to yourself, especially from a cat who would never admit she needed it.

The broth also became a way to give her the pills she hates, hidden in the warm lump so she never tastes the betrayal. A cat who trusts the bowl will swallow what she would spit from a hand, and the warm food hides more than medicine, it hides the fact that I am the one in charge of the routine she pretends not to notice while she judges me from the radiator.

People ask if it is worth the effort for an animal who will never say thanks. It is. Mabel does not thank me, but she drinks, and drinking is the thank-you, written in a coat that stays soft and a body that stays here, and here is the only place I want her, for as long as the warm pan and the second bowl can keep her out of the trouble that starts with a saucer left full and a person too busy to see it.