My Picky Cat Ignored Her Bowl Until This

Juniper will not drink from a bowl. She never has. For three years the only water she would take was out of the bathroom sink, with the tap running, with me standing there holding it open for her like a valet.

It started when she was a kitten and it never wore off. Six in the morning, she would hop up on the counter, sit down, and stare at the faucet until I turned it on. She would take four or five laps, shake one paw, and get down. Then we would do the whole thing again at noon, and again before bed. I told myself it was charming for about the first month.

I tried the obvious fixes. A wider bowl, a bowl raised up on a plate, a bowl moved into the laundry room next to her food. She ignored all three. The water sat there and got a film on top and I poured it out every other day. So early this year I bought a Veken fountain, the 95oz C1 Classic, mostly because I was tired of standing at a sink at six in the morning.

The part that surprised me is that she did not need to be taught. I plugged it in, filled it, set it on the floor beside her dish, and walked away. She came in about twenty minutes later, sniffed the edge, and drank for a solid thirty seconds. Glen asked me what I had done to her.

That was most of this year ago. The Veken has been running in that same spot ever since and I have not turned on a bathroom tap for her once in that time.

Three years of standing at a sink, and what fixed it was moving water in the room where she already eats.

Here is how I actually run it. Once a week I rinse the whole thing in the kitchen sink, the top, the bowl, and the spout section, and I pull the pump off and rinse that too. The manual asks for more than that. It says to clean the pump and change the filter every one to two weeks. I will be straight with you, I stretch the filter to about once a month. I can tell when it is due because the flow starts looking a little thin.

There are two settings. One lets the water fall in a wide sheet like a running faucet, and the other is gentler. Juniper only cares about the first one. I tried the gentler setting for a week and she was back at the bathroom sink within two days, so we are a falling-water household now.

There is a window on the front that shows the water level, and a small blue light so you can see it in a dim room. I thought the light was a gimmick and I was wrong. The laundry room is dark at 6:15 and I can see at a glance whether it needs topping off. The switch is on the cord, which sounds like nothing until you have crawled behind an appliance to unplug something. It holds 95 ounces, so I add water every other morning and that is mostly evaporation.

The Parts That Annoyed Me

Now the complaints, because I have a few. It is plastic, and after ten months the bowl section has a faint cloudy look to it no matter how often I wash it. The pump is quiet but it is not silent. I hear a low hum from the hallway, which is honestly useful because it tells me when the level has dropped, but if you were thinking about putting one in a bedroom, do not.

The other issue is placement. It is corded, so it has to sit near an outlet, and the cord is six feet. Ours is 8.4 inches across and fits between Juniper's dish and the wall. It lives on the laundry room floor because that room has an outlet behind the dryer and because Biscuit, our beagle mix, cannot get through the door. That last part matters. I would not leave a fountain on the floor with a dog who eats anything in reach.

And it works, is the thing. She drinks out of it four or five times a day that I catch. I am not going to tell you it fixed anything medical. I have no idea, I am not a vet, and she is ten pounds of stubborn. All I can tell you is that before, she drank when I stood at a sink, and now she drinks when she wants to.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across the table from me with a cup of coffee, here is what I would say. If your cat drinks from the tap, or from the sink, or from the dog's bowl because it is the only water in the house that moves, buy one, and buy a size that means you are not filling it twice a day. If your cat already drinks from a bowl without any complaint, skip it. It is one more thing on the floor that needs washing, and you will resent it by the second month. And if you know in your heart that you will not keep up with the filter, admit that going in, because the pump is the part that pays for it and the pump is the whole machine.