H2O

You may have noticed that I'm addicted to buying my pets things. Usually they are things that are necessary, sometimes they're not. Recently, we decided to buy a communal water dish for all the pets. We have a small ottoman that we put the cat's food and water on so Odie can't get it, and Odie's dishes are on the floor. The ottoman also doubles as an unfortunate scratching post, and we'll likely have to find a solution to that in the future, because it's a hideous clawed mess. When we first brought Odie home, we bought her porcelin food and water dishes and thought it would be funny to have them engraved with "food" and "water" in spanish (so she could read it).

Water

The problem is that the dish isn't very deep, and the cats don't just stick to their own water dish. Odie lets us know by whining when it's empty, but if no one is home, then she's out of luck. The food dish is perfect, because chihuahuas don't eat that much. Since the new water dish would be for all three animals, I thought it would be nice to get one with a fountain and filter. I picked up a Petmate Fresh Flow fountain, and I was really impressed with it at first. After about an hour, it sucked. It started making crazy sounds, and Odie was extremely cautious when approaching it. For awhile, she sat a meter away from it and whined. When I would unplug it and plug it back in and wiggle everything inside, it would return to normal. After a couple more hours, it was the crazy sounds again. I followed all the troubleshooting instructions, but it continued. Back it went. I've read some really great reviews of it online, but I didn't feel like getting another one and possibly have to return it too.


Instead of the fancy fountain, I bought a plain jane waterer, and it's great. No, the water isn't flowing, but it does the job. I found it at walmart, in the cat section (all of the ones in the dog section were huge). It's not very pretty, and isn't engraved, but we don't have to worry about anyone going without water. We might upgrade to something different and non-plastic in the future, but this'll do for now.