The tale of my cat, Tails, has been oft told.
The important points are these–a kitten with a broken tail and a broken foot ran in the garage on a cold November day two and a half years ago and never left. In time the sore on her back paw healed and the fur regrew, and the tail remains bent 90 degrees about halfway up. She doesn’t like people, and moving the cat from Pennsylvania to North Carolina was a minor logistical nightmare, and since the move she’s been positively anti-social. She doesn’t care to drink water out of a dish, and she doesn’t care to drink milk out of a dish. The only thing she will drink is water out of the toilet, and when I tried to break her of the habit by leaving the lids down on all the toilets in the house she became sick from dehydration. Tails is a strange cat. That’s the only way to describe her.
Today I bought her a ceramic food dish at World Market. It’s decorated with images of a flying blue cat. It looks rather cute. We’ll see if she likes the dish. I don’t expect her to hide the dish or cart it away to a corner, the way she has of late with her current dish.
I’ve been looking lately at cat furniture at PetSmart, something for Tails to climb on, sleep on, play on. I don’t know quite why I’ve been looking at the cat furniture; it vaguely depresses when I realize that she doesn’t like being out in the open, and the cat furniture they have would have to sit out in the open if I brought it home.
So, the cat dish is a peace offering to Tails. Hopefully she won’t change her eating habits.
At eight o’clock this morning I was at Target to buy Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets on DVD. Did I really need it that badly? Certainly not as badly as the woman behind me in line pushing a cart holding fifty or sixty copies of the film. I hope, really and truly hope, she runs a rental store of some sort.
I also picked up The Rocketeer on this morning’s DVD run, on sale for under ten dollars. The Rocketeer remains one of the best comic-to-film translations done, and one of the great underappreciated films. Good stuff if you can find it.
I had a cat that had the same problem. I noticed she didn’t have any problem drinking iced water from a glass tumbler I was drinking from, so I’d drink a bit and leave it on the floor, and she’d drink it (although this may be an assault on your common sensibilities, which you can avoid by just washing the glasses thoroughly in hot water 🙂
I have a friend who has two cats, and the only way she can get them to drink water is to leave it running in the sink.
Isn’t it harmful for adult cats to drink milk?