Susan Hartley Facebook ad: “He'd Been Telling Me For Years”

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My cat sat in the kitchen sink every morning for eleven years. I thought it was a funny little habit. It was a complaint. ⠀ Alfie is twelve. Ginger, enormous, thinks he runs the house. Every morning before I'd even filled the kettle he'd be up in that sink staring at the tap, waiting for me to turn it on. Six in the morning. Ten at night. Sometimes two in the morning, crying at the bath until I got up and did it for him. My daughter said I was his butler. I've got photos of him up there going back years. ⠀ And the whole time, his water bowl sat three feet away on the floor. Ceramic. A nice one. Washed every single morning without fail. Full. Always full. ⠀ Three weeks ago the vet did his bloods. She came back in holding the printout and she didn't sit down. She turned it round on the desk and went through it with the end of her pen. His levels are up. Nothing to panic about yet, she said. But she wants him back in six weeks. And she needs more water going into him before then. ⠀ I said I've got a bowl down. I change it every day. She said that's the problem. ⠀ Cats came from desert animals. Their thirst drive is weak, so they don't top themselves up the way we do, and in the wild they get most of their water out of what they eat. On top of that they will not drink from still water if they can possibly avoid it. Still water in the wild is where things go bad. They're wired to walk past it and go and find something moving. ⠀ Which is exactly what he'd been doing. In my sink. For eleven years. While I stood there and laughed at him. ⠀ Then she told me the part I still can't stop thinking about. That bowl I washed every single morning was never as clean as I believed it was. Water that sits still all day doesn't stay the way you poured it. A bit of him goes in every time he goes near it. Hair. Dust. Bits of food. It sits there at room temperature and it grows a film on the inside that you cannot see and a sponge cannot reach, because glazed ceramic and plastic both scratch over the years. You can feel it if you run a finger round the bottom. That slightly slippery bit you always assumed was just wet. He could smell it. He'd been able to smell it the whole time. ⠀ She asked if I filled it straight from the tap as well. Of course I do, I said. She said tap water is perfectly fine for us, but it carries a chlorine taste that we stop noticing by about the age of five. A cat never stops noticing it. ⠀ So there it was. Eleven years of a bowl he was never going to drink from. And eleven years of me topping it up and feeling quite pleased with myself. ⠀ I sat in the car park for a while before I could drive home. Because this had happened before, and I hadn't understood it then either. ⠀ We had a little tortoiseshell called Bess before him. She did the same thing. Sat at the taps. Cried at the bath. Never went near her bowl. Everyone told me cats are just like that. She went downhill when she was fourteen and it was her kidneys, and I sat on the vet's floor and held her and I never once connected it to a bowl. ⠀ I got home from Alfie's appointment and the first thing I saw was that bowl on the kitchen floor. Still full. Same as I'd left it that morning. Same as it had been every day of his life. And I thought, I am not doing this twice. ⠀ So that night I sat down with my tablet and looked up cat fountains, because moving water is the obvious answer isn't it. There were dozens. Twenty pounds, twenty five, one with a little flower on the top and eleven thousand reviews. I very nearly bought that one. ⠀ What stopped me was the reviews further down. Not the five stars. The ones from people six months in. Cat loved it for a week, then wouldn't touch it. Slimy film in the bottom that came back within days no matter how they scrubbed. Pump packed in after four months. One woman had been through three of them and her cat rejected all three. ⠀ And it clicked. They're all plastic. I'd have been buying my exact problem again with a motor in it. ⠀ Because the moving water is only half of it. If the water is moving around inside scratched plastic all day, the film is still there, the smell is still there, and your cat still walks away. You've just spent twenty five pounds to end up back where you started. ⠀ So I stopped looking at prices and started looking at what they were actually made of. I ended up with one called KittySip. Steel the whole way through. Not a steel bowl sat on top of a plastic tank, which is what half of them turn out to be when you look underneath. ⠀ The water comes out like a little tap running, all day and all night. That's the whole point of it. It's the exact thing he'd been sitting in my sink asking me for since he was a kitten, except now he doesn't have to wait for me to get out of bed. The steel doesn't scratch the way the old bowl did, so there's nothing for that film to get a grip on. And the water keeps moving through a filter instead of sitting still. Three layers, and it takes the chlorine taste out as well. He noticed that before I did. ⠀ I put it down on the Sunday and stood in my kitchen feeling daft, waiting. He circled it twice. Sniffed it. Walked off. I honestly thought I'd wasted my money. ⠀ Monday morning I heard him drinking it before I got out of bed. Properly drinking, not a couple of licks. By day three he hadn't been in the sink once. First morning in eleven years I made a cup of tea on my own. By the end of the first week I had to top it up, which had never happened with the bowl, because the bowl never went down. Week two he stopped crying at the bath at night. He hasn't been in that sink since. ⠀ I know exactly what you're thinking, because I thought all of it too. ⠀ She won't use it. Mine circled it for a day and a half and I was convinced. That's the only reason I bought one with a full year money back guarantee instead of the cheap one. You put it on the floor, you leave her old bowl down as well for a bit, and you let her decide in her own time. If she never takes to it, you send it back and you've lost nothing. ⠀ It'll be noisy. Alfie is a coward and it doesn't bother him. The pump sits under the water so you hear the stream, not the motor. ⠀ Filters forever. Four come with it, they last about a month each, and nothing signs you up to anything. ⠀ It's more than the plastic ones. It is. I'd already spent eleven years on a bowl that was quietly the whole problem. I wasn't doing it again to save thirty quid. ⠀ It's 50% off at the moment with the four filters included, and the year long guarantee is on it either way. ⠀ If your cat drinks out of the tap, or the shower, or your glass while you're holding it, and walks past a bowl you keep filling up. She isn't being fussy. She's been telling you. Bess told me for fourteen years and I never once heard her. ⠀ It's called KittySip, and it's the one thing I wish somebody had put in front of me eleven years ago 👇 👉 https://shoppethaven.co/products/kittysip-cat-water-fountain-stainless-steel

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shoppethaven.co

He'd Been Telling Me For Years

Heres where I got mine