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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a silly idea, but how about one of those cat fountains that recycles water as a distraction?

That has the whole moving water & noise aspect without continuous water intake

I think it's not such a silly idea. At least it works for my mom's cat, which also only drinks running water.

And... we just got rid of ours, as neither of our cats would use it, instead preferring an upstairs water dish. We'd used it for years, and knew they weren't using it "much", but after watching more closely for a while, we realized they basically never used it. Replaced it with a regular water dish and they're drinking all the time now. Note - they were drinking before, just had to trudge upstairs each time.

But... earlier generation of cats used the fountain. Seems very cat-dependent. I suspect had we only had that option, they may have used it, but didn't want to test that level of harshness.

Ours would only drink from the tap. It was very persistent. So we got the fountain.

(A little off-topic, sorry!)

Does anyone have advice for a cat that drinks water by dipping their paw in the bowl and then licking their paw?

My cat will only lick water straight from the bowl if I stand over her while she is at the bowl (when she tries using her paw, I grab the paw wiping the water off with my hand and say "no", she pauses for a bit, and then relents and licks the water from the bowl)

When I'm not there, she leaves wet paw prints through the house.

I don't have any advice, just found this interesting because one of the kittens I had years ago would always stick his paws into the water dish when drinking. It's not like the bowl was too high or he needed leverage- the food dish had the same dimensions and he never did it for the food dish. He just seemed to enjoy having his front paws in the water when drinking shrugs.

Paws in the water while lapping up the water from the bowl with his tongue? Wild lol.

Yep, whenever he was lapping up water, he'd have his front two paws submerged in the water dish the whole time! He was an interesting cat- he seemed to have sensitivity stuff going on. For example, while all cats raise their hindquarters when someone touches the base of their tail, he could be in a dead sleep and even the lightest touch on the base of his tail would activate this reflex to the extreme. He was a funny little guy, I loved him :). He liked to come and curl up on my chest whenever I'd recline during a zoom call, only to leave as soon as the call ended.

It could be that the bowl is to deep / not wide enough and the it brushes the whiskers, which makes it uncomfortable for the cat to drink normally.

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