Teach Me Tuesday: Drinking from a Water Bottle

I am working to introduce my own 3 cats to kennels and water bottles, to prepare them for a long flight next month. We are moving to Singapore!! I will definitely share everything I've learned about the whole process in the very near future (preparations, paperwork, shippers, quarantine, kennels, best airlines, etc).

But anyway, back to the topic at hand. Teaching cats to drink from a water bottle. None of them ever had seen one before much less drank from one, so it was interesting. 

I found this video online, was very helpful:





I dip the end of the bottle in wet food and they lick it off.  Best to do it when they're already hungry.  Fancy Feast gravy lovers really works for us, since that's their special treat food, and it has a lot of liquid gravy in there. I found if I tried it with wet food they didn't really love, they decided after just a couple licks that it just wasn't the effort, and it lost their interest.

Now that their kennels are all assembled I feed them all meals there. I put the bowls all the way in the back for now, so they get used to crawling all the way in. After a couple weeks I'll start feeding them in the door hanging bowls, and after that I'll try closing the door for feeding time. Slow and steady wins the race, especially when teaching cats.

Here's a photo of dinnertime last night, with my 3 cats:

Oliver, Meatball, and Pretzel getting dinner in the kennels.

That's all for now! More coming soon. Let me know if you have any questions!

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