Water, water everywhere

Like most people, I tend to put Bella's food and water close together. Most of the cats I look after have this arrangement too, and some even have those double bowls where you put the food in one side and the water in the other. Always a bit tricky when it comes to emptying and cleaning I find - either the remaining food or the water goes everywhere!!

It must have been a couple of years ago now, that I was sitting watching tv, with a glass of water on the floor by my feet. Bella came along, sniffed it and had a drink. Then this started to happen all the time. Even if the water was quite low she'd manage to get her face squeezed in and drink! Can't have been comfortable. So, I thought, well she likes to drink out of glasses, so I'll swap her drinking bowl for a glass. But she still came along and drunk mine!!

Not long after, I went to meet a new client for the first time, and they told me, almost apologetically that their cat likes to drink out of a glass! They thought it was only their cat, so I had to tell them that Bella also does that. And they weren't the only ones either. More and more new customers were telling me the same thing!

If you've got a cat, and they go outside, you'll probably notice that they'll drink out of absolutely anything, and it's frequently quite disgusting! I've always got a couple of water bowls in the garden for Bella, as during the nicer months she'll spend most of her time outdoors - I'd rather encourage her to drink cleaner, fresher water than whatever she finds in a mucky puddle! I realise that it's probably no problem to them at all, after all if they lived wild that's exactly what they'd have to do. But still....... And then there are all the cats that like to drink running water from the tap, in the bath, or the toilet!

She went off drinking glasses after a while, so we returned to water bowls. But even then she'd have her food and want to go outside for a drink. Even when it was freezing cold - there was one morning we'd woken up to a heavy frost and the water outside had frozen. But she was still pawing it, trying to get it to behave! I watched for a bit, but then decided I ought to be kind and replenish it with running water. Happy cat drunk water, then hopped back indoors to the warm.

Then one day, I read an article that told me that cats don't like to eat and drink in the same place. I thought about this, and it made sense. Going way back, cats are desert animals, and when they caught something and ate it, there wouldn't naturally be water close by. So they've grown up, all through the thousands of generations, not expecting to eat and drink in the same place. It's not really that they don't like to, it's just that to them it's not normal.

Then I kicked myself!! How stupid had I been? Bella didn't particularly want to drink out of a glass, she just found it more normal to drink somewhere other than her food was. The signs were there, but I'd completely misinterpreted them. So now, she has water bowls everywhere, and happily drinks from them when she feels like it. She still has a water bowl by her food - but hardly touches it. Some habits are hard (for me) to break!

Once I realised, I communicated with her intuitively, to see why she'd not told me before. Well, in typical cat style, she told me she had, and repeatedly, I just wasn't listening. And she was right.........