Feeding & Nutrition

I caught her doing it by accident. The bathroom floor after a shower, still beaded with water, and the old cat, Maisie, flat on her side lapping at the tile like it was the only drink in the house. I'd been putting fresh water down twice a day in three different bowls and she'd been ignoring all of them in favour of the damp floor, which is a sentence about me more than her.

Cats are odd about water and everyone knows the line, but Maisie took it further than the books. She wouldn't touch a still bowl. Not the ceramic, not the steel, not the one by the window she liked to sit by. She'd drink from the tap if I ran it, and from the shower floor, and once, memorably, from a puddle in a plant saucer after I'd watered too hard. The bowls, the clean ones, the ones I washed, were beneath her.

The worry underneath it is dehydration, because an old cat who won't drink is a cat heading for kidney trouble, and kidney trouble in an old cat is the thing they don't come back from. So this wasn't a quirk to laugh at. It was a slow drain I'd been missing because the floor was wet and I'd assumed she was fine.

A friend with a Maine coon said get a fountain, the moving-water one, the kind that bubbles. I'd rolled my eyes at fountains, the whirring plastic thing on every cat influencer's shelf, until I realised the only water she'd take was moving, and a fountain is just a tap that doesn't need me to stand there holding it. I bought the ugly one, set it up, and watched.

She approached like it might be a trap. Circled. Put a paw in. Then drank, properly, the long laps of a cat who'd been thirsty and too proud to use a bowl. I've since learned this is common, the still surface doesn't read as water to some cats, the reflection puts them off, and the movement says drink to a brain wired for streams and leaks, not lakes in a dish.

The fountain needs upkeep, I'll be honest. The filter, the weekly wash, the quiet motor that clicks if the water runs low and wakes you at three. But the alternative was a cat licking tile and a slow march to the vet, and the fountain is cheaper than that road by miles. She drinks now, visibly, daily, and the plant saucer has gone back to holding a plant.

What I took from it was simple and annoying. I'd supplied water, correctly, by the book, and she'd needed it delivered differently, and the gap between those two facts was my job to close, not hers to cross. The bowls weren't wrong. They were just not her. A fountain is a small thing to learn about a creature you've had for eleven years, and eleven years in I'm still finding out who she is.

She's on the fountain now, permanent, and the shower floor has lost its appeal. Old cat, same stubbornness, finally met halfway by a plastic bubbler. If your cat ignores the bowl, before you worry, try moving water. She might just be waiting for it to flow.

Maisie inspected the fountain the way she inspects everything new, from a distance, with suspicion, and the first day she drank once and walked away like it might be a trap, and the second day she drank and came back, and by the third it was hers, the bubbling plastic thing she'd decided was the only honest water in the flat.

The bathroom floor dried out, finally, and I stopped finding paw prints on the tile after showers, which my cleaner noticed and commented on, asking what changed, and I said the cat learned to use a bowl, which is the short version of a long silly story about an old animal and a tap she refused to trust.

Old cats are particular in ways that look like spite and are usually just preference, and the fountain taught me to ask what she wanted instead of what she should want, which is a question I could apply to more of the house than the water. She's eleven and set in her ways, and the ways turn out to be negotiable if I meet her at the stream, not the lake.

She's on the fountain now, permanent, and the shower floor has lost its appeal. A fountain is a small thing to learn about a creature you've had for a decade, and a decade in I'm still finding out who she is, one ignored bowl at a time. If your cat won't drink, try moving water before you worry. She may just be waiting for it to flow.