Small ways to help cats drink more water

Cats descend from desert animals that took most of their water from prey. They have a weak thirst drive relative to their needs, and a cat on dry food alone will typically under-drink for its whole life without ever looking obviously dehydrated. Everything below is about narrowing that gap.

Start with the food

This is the change that matters most and it is not a gadget. Wet food sits around eighty per cent moisture; dry food sits around eight. Replacing even one meal a day with wet food moves more water into a cat than any bowl arrangement will. If you keep dry food for grazing, that is fine. Just stop treating the water bowl as the main source.

Then fix the bowl

• Wide and shallow. A narrow bowl presses on the whiskers, which most cats dislike enough to cut the drink short.
• Ceramic or glass. Plastic holds smells and scratches; steel is fine but some cats object to the noise of a tag against it.
• Filled to the brim, so the cat does not have to put its head down into a well it cannot see out of.
• Away from the food. Cats instinctively avoid drinking beside a kill; a bowl next to dinner gets used less.
• More than one, in different rooms, including somewhere quiet and somewhere the cat already passes through.

Fountains: useful, not magic

Moving water is more attractive to a lot of cats, and a fountain genuinely does increase intake for some households. It also needs the filter changed monthly and the whole unit stripped and scrubbed every fortnight, because a warm pump circulating saliva-contaminated water builds biofilm quickly. A dirty fountain is worse than a clean bowl.

Every cat has an opinion about water. Put out three options and let it tell you which one it wants.

When drinking changes, pay attention

A sudden increase in thirst in an adult or older cat is one of the more useful early signs in feline medicine, and it points at several conditions worth catching early. If your cat starts emptying bowls it used to ignore, or you are refilling noticeably more often, book a vet appointment rather than congratulating yourself on the new fountain.