Dear Sparkle,
We are a pair of young girl cats who found a new home after a brief stay at a cat rescue. We’ve been here for two months and have come to the conclusion that our human is very strange! She gives us a big bowl of water, then gets upset when we play in it! We bat at the water with our paws, wrestle a bit and inevitably, the bowl gets knocked over. But our human thinks we’re supposed to drink the water, not play with it! She’s always mopping up the water and moaning about her floor. Once she tried getting us a fountain-type bowl with running water,
but we thought it was scary. In any case, we don’t think water is for drinking, it’s for fun! So how can we calm down our neurotic human?
Signed,
Water Babies
Dear Water Babies,
You may think your human is strange, but I think you both are a little weird too. I am not a fan of water sports, or anything that risks my getting wet. Most cats are like me, but there does seem to be a water-loving minority. I wonder if you all are related. Anyhow, I understand that as new kitties, you want to avoid upsetting your human and give her a good impression, but you know what? You really don’t have to. Give it a few more weeks and you’ll discover that your human—if she’s worthy of having you live with her—will go out of her way to accommodate any odd habits you may have. At first she may try to make you do things her way, for example, by buying you that water fountain. But you needn’t modify your behavior one bit. Eventually your human will realize she’s the only one who cares whether her floor gets ruined, and she’ll go out and get some sort of absorbent mat to put underneath your water bowl. And that’ll be the end of it. There are so many disagreements that could be quickly solved if only humans didn’t feel it necessary to do their little dance of wills with their cats. After living with us for thousands of years, you’d think they would figure out that they will lose every time.
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