Susan Hartley Facebook ad: “Read this if your cat quit her fountian”

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I bought him a fountain and he stopped using it after two weeks. I thought he was being difficult. He wasn't. ⠀ Alfie is thirteen. Ginger, enormous, thinks he runs the house. For years he sat in the kitchen sink every morning crying at the tap until I turned it on. Six in the morning. Ten at night. Sometimes two in the morning. My daughter said I was his butler. ⠀ So I did what you're supposed to do. I looked it up. Cats prefer moving water. Everyone knows that. I bought a fountain. Twenty-two pounds, plastic, the one with the flower on the top, eleven thousand reviews. ⠀ And it worked. He drank from it the first afternoon. Properly, not a couple of licks. I stood in my kitchen feeling quite pleased with myself. ⠀ Two weeks later he stopped. ⠀ Not straight away. First he started hesitating at it. Then he'd walk over, put his head down, and stop. Sniff it. Turn round. Walk off. By week four he was back at the tap and the fountain was on the worktop, unplugged. ⠀ So I cleaned it properly. Every few days instead of weekly. Scrubbed the inside out with a brush. Nothing. I changed the filter early in case that was it. Nothing. ⠀ I bought a second one. Ceramic, forty pounds, because obviously the cheap plastic was the problem. Two weeks. Then the same thing. ⠀ I bought a third that said stainless steel on the box. Two weeks. Same. ⠀ Over a hundred pounds of fountains, all three of them under my sink. And me back at the tap twice a day like nothing had changed. ⠀ And I decided he was just an awkward cat. That some cats are like that. That I'd got one. That there was nothing left to try. I stopped thinking about it. ⠀ That's what I believed when I took him in for his bloods last spring. ⠀ They came back with his kidney markers up. Early, the vet said. Not dangerous yet. But he needs more water going into him, and he needs it now. ⠀ I sat in that room and did the maths. Two years. Two years of a thirteen-year-old cat drinking less than he needed. Two years of me running a tap for a minute twice a day and calling it sorted. Two years of thinking the problem was him. ⠀ I asked the vet if I'd done this. She said no. And then she told me the thing nobody had told me in two years. ⠀ There are two things stopping a cat drinking. Not one. A fountain only fixes one of them. ⠀ The first one is the still water. Cats came from desert animals. In the wild, water that sits still is where things go bad, so they're wired to walk past it and find something moving. That's why he sat at my tap. And a fountain genuinely fixes that. That's real. That's why mine worked for the first fortnight. ⠀ But there's a second thing happening inside the fountain while it's doing that. Something you cannot see and cannot smell. ⠀ Water sitting in the same tank all day doesn't stay the way you poured it. A bit of your cat goes in every time he goes near it. Saliva. Hair. Dust. Bacteria settle on the inside and build a film. Invisible. Slick. Thin enough that you'd never spot it. It's called biofilm. ⠀ And here's the bit that matters. Biofilm needs something to grip. On a smooth surface it can't get hold, and it rinses away. But plastic isn't smooth. Not once you've owned it. ⠀ Plastic scratches within weeks. Not scratches you'd see — tiny ones, from washing up, from grit in a sponge, from a brush going round the inside every Sunday. And the film settles down inside those scratches, where a sponge physically cannot reach. ⠀ So the fountain looks spotless. And the film is still in there. You can't smell it. He can. ⠀ A cat's nose isn't a bit better than ours. It's in a different league. He was standing over that water reading it, and walking away. ⠀ So think about what actually happened. Week one: brand new plastic. Smooth. He drinks happily. Week two: my own cleaning has put fine scratching into it. The film starts building in there. Week three: he can smell it. He approaches, checks, declines. Week four: back at the tap. And I'm blaming him. ⠀ The fountain never stopped working. The water in it changed, and only one of us could tell. ⠀ And every week after that, a cat with kidneys already under strain was drinking less than he needed, while I scrubbed a fountain that was never going to work again. ⠀ Cleaning it more doesn't help. The problem is inside the surface, not on it. It's like a wooden chopping board after five years of knife marks. You can scrub it as long as you like. It looks clean. It smells clean to you. And you'd still not want to do raw chicken on it. ⠀ So what actually works? Two things at once. Moving water, so he comes over. And a surface the film can't get a grip on, so he's still coming back on day sixty. ⠀ That means steel. Proper steel. 304 medical-grade stainless steel — the same stuff they make surgical instruments out of. It doesn't develop the texture the film needs. There's nothing to hold onto, so it doesn't build, and what does land rinses straight off. ⠀ But before you go and search "stainless steel cat fountain" — I need to tell you the thing that cost me forty pounds. ⠀ Half of them aren't. The steel is the bowl on top. The bit in the photograph. The tank underneath — where the water actually sits for twenty-three and a half hours a day, where the pump lives — is plastic. ⠀ So the water sits in plastic. Builds its film in plastic. Then gets lifted into a steel bowl for ten seconds before your cat sniffs it and walks off. You'd never know from the listing. ⠀ Turn it over before you buy it. That's the most useful thing I can tell anyone. And if you've got one in a cupboard right now, go and turn that over too. It'll show you exactly why it stopped. ⠀ I ended up with one called KittySip. Steel the whole way through. Bowl and tank both. Not a steel lid on a plastic tub. ⠀ He went straight to it. I put it down on the kitchen floor, plugged it in, and he was drinking out of it before I'd got the box out of the way. Properly drinking. Head down, taking his time. I stood there and watched him for about five minutes because I couldn't quite believe it. ⠀ He hasn't been in that sink since. Not once. ⠀ By the end of the first week I had to top it up. That had never happened with the others, because he'd stopped using them long before the water went down. ⠀ And then the bit that actually mattered. Week four. Week eight. Week twelve. Still using it. Every day. That had never once happened before. ⠀ We went back at six weeks. His numbers had come down. The vet went through the printout twice and asked me what I'd changed. I told her I'd found a fountain he hadn't stopped using — and I told her why. The steel. The film. The bit about the tank underneath. She wrote it in his notes. ⠀ And then she said she'd start asking her other owners what theirs was made of. ⠀ I know what you're thinking, because I thought all of it. ⠀ He'll stop using this one too. That's what I was waiting for. Week three came and went and he was still on it. So did week eight. If yours genuinely never takes to it, you send it back inside the year and you've lost nothing — but the whole reason mine kept going is that nothing changed in the water. ⠀ It'll be noisy. It isn't. Alfie's a coward about noise and it doesn't bother him at all — you barely notice it's running, because the pump sits under the water. All you hear is the stream. ⠀ Filters forever. Four in the box, one a month, and nothing signs you up to anything. ⠀ It's more than the plastic ones. It is. But I'm two years in now and he's still using it every single day — and his bloods came back better than they were. The plastic ones cost me over a hundred pounds and two weeks of use each. This one cost me fifty and it's still going. Work out which one was actually expensive. ⠀ If you've got a fountain in a cupboard. If he used it for a fortnight and then stopped. If you quietly decided he was just difficult. ⠀ He isn't being fussy. He hasn't got anything against fountains. He's telling you what's in the water. It's the only way he can. ⠀ It's called KittySip. It's 50% off at the moment with the four filters in the box, and if he never takes to it you send it back inside the year and you've lost nothing. ⠀ I had two years of thinking it was him. I'd give a lot to have those two years back. You've still got yours. 👉 https://shoppethaven.co/products/kittysip-cat-water-fountain-stainless-steel

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☝️ Read this if your cat quit her fountian

She drinks from the tap, the shower, your glass — and walks past the bowl you keep filling. This is the fountain that got Alfie drinking again.