I couldn’t help it, it was just too funny.
My cat’s water bowl was empty this morning so I filled it up nice and full. Apparently, Teddy didn’t know this though. He stuck his head in with the intent of going all the way to the bottom where the water level had been. And instead his poor nose encountered cold water way up at the top of the bowl. And I laughed. I’m a bad, bad person. 
oh yeah, my cats have problems with their stainless steel water bowl too. One of’em will actually either bat the side of the bowl, or pick it up in his mouth and drop it to induce waves in the water. Took us a while to figure out what the mysterious thumping in our kitchen was…
Fatcat slowly lowers his front paw until his front toes touch the surface of the water. A-ha! Once he figures out where the water level is, he licks the water off his toes and proceeds to drink normally.
lately he has found the pots of water I’ve put on my big steam radiators (to evaporate and hopefully make my apartment a little less “desert-dry”.) So now he’s enjoying drinks of hot water.
Soon I’m going to switch him over to coffee…
And the sad thing is, if you get him glasses it’ll just be even funnier.
I probably should note that he only has one eye which it makes it just that much crueler that I laughed.
I really like the techniques that others’ cats have come up with to figure out the water depth thing. If only there were good ways to teach cats. The saying really ought to be “You can’t teach an old cat - or a young one for that matter - new tricks.”
Is that why they do that? God, Alex has been dragging the water bowl around the bathroom floor for years! It never even occurred to me that that’s what he was doing.
Learn something new every day, I guess. 
Strange that cats never evolved a whisker extending forward.
Water fascinates cats! One of ours runs into the bathroom ahead whichever one of us is headed there (which can be annoying, as once in front of us, she slows to a saunter) and jumps up onto the counter surrounding the sink so she can watch the water swirling in the toilet.
Fatcat has been taught several tricks (“beg”, “speak”, and this pirouette thing my dad taught him). Even at the spry age of 11, my former housemate was teaching him new ones. They can be trained.
Granted, sometimes Fatcat cheats. Rather than do his pirouette, he thinks he can just take a few backwards steps on his hind legs and that’s good enough. Jerk.
You know what else is funny? When cats lose their whiskers on one side* and bump into things on that side since they don’t have their proximity sensors anymore.
I do not advocate removing cat’s whiskers, however I have seen them lost due to getting them shaved off when prepping a surgical area on the face, getting too close to a fire or a bird cage (a coworker had a cat who always sat next to the budgie cage but only on one side - the budgie pulled out or bit off all the cats whiskers on that side) or being in the vicinity of a child with scissors.
Can I share a bird story? Once, we were eating our dinner and the bird was in the cage, because she tended to jump in the food. For some reason, I glanced up at her. She looked up at me. Our eyes met. I was her favorite, so she ran! to mommy…
And smacked right into the cage bars. She was fine, just shocked, and I couldn’t quite laughing.
Our dogs will sometimes drink their water by dunking their entire snoot in the dish. Splish, splash, drink. What a mess. But hilarious to watch.
I once had a cat who dipped his paw into the water dish before he drank. I wonder if he was checking the water level?
Edith the Pug runs into the screen door on our basement patio so often that I’ve learned to pick her up before opening the glass part of the door. She does it every frickin’ time! Will she never learn?
Pugs have to do that or their snouts will grow out and their tongues will be able to fit in their mouths. God’s truth.
We have some sort of dog that we don’t know what the hell it is. It has fur like hair which is about 1 1/2" long, the face of a Jack Russell terrier and the body of a Greyhound/Whippet. It is easily the most food & prey driven dog I’ve ever seen and will eagerly go after any kind of food it sees or smells. If he or one of the other dogs drops a bit of dog food in the water bowl, he will root around at the bottom of it to get the food, loudly blowing bubbles through his nose the whole time. Most amusing!
Our last cat (now deceased) would ONLY drink from a running water faucet for her last few years. It didn’t matter how many bowls of water we left out for her, she INSISTED that she had to have water fresh from the source–notably our bathroom sink.
We now have two new cats who are definitely obsessed with water.
Cat A is a big, fat, long-haired cat we found as a stray, probably ~3yo. He is very lazy, and when we first got him, his favorite way of obtaining water was to plop down in a reclined position relatively close to a water bowl, then use his paw to pull the bowl within reach of his tongue.
Cat B is a high-strung, short-haired cat, who acts like she is afraid of EVERYTHING. However, she is one of those cats who drinks primarily by dipping her paw completely into the bowl of water, and licking the water off her paw. She will drink straight from the bowl, but only after she’s gotten tired of licking water off her paw. OTOH, she gets really grossed out if she walks into a wet shower and gets water on her paws.
We left them alone for an extended weekend, and bought a pet water bubbler to make sure that they had plenty of water while we were gone. For those who aren’t familiar with this product, it’s essentially a bottle of water that is inverted over a bowl, and it can provide up to a gallon of water at a time. However, once the water level drops down a bit, bubbles bubble into the bottle, making a loud burbling noise.
The first few times the water bottle burbled at the cats, they ran for their lives–it was hysterical. Cat B is still not too sure about the safety of this device, but she will drink from the bowl of water if it is the most readly available source of water. Cat B, however, LOVES this thing now. He will lie down at the bowl of water, and literally drink until it burbles at him, regardless of how much water he has to drink until he gets to that point. When I refill the bottle, it burbles for a good ten minutes until it finally reaches the “full” level in the bowl, and he gets very excited sitting in the bathroom watching it burble whenever I refill it.
Cat A also LOVES to watch toilets flush, and has occasionally reached his paw in to try to grab stuff floating as it swirls around. Cat B watched the show a few times, but has lost interest in the last couple of months.
If my cat is thirsty and the water dish is empty, she will sit in it until someone notices and fills it up for her.
I had another cat the tried the plunging the head thing in. Only this was with a lit candle. I then found out that cat hair smells just like human hair when singed. (she was fine, only some fur and whiskers lost, no actual burns)
My cat enjoys sticking his face into his water bowl and then rubbing his wet nose agaisnt me. He’ll also stick his paws in it and bat it around the kitchen, probably because he’s forgotten where he hid all of his toys.
Get this: My cat will perch on the toilet in order to drink the (clean) toilet water. He drinks from his dish as well, but it’s rather odd to walk into the bathroom, turn on the light & see him perched precariously, giving me that “Dammit, you caught me!” look.
Our dog Jimmy (Aussie shep/black lab mix) does something weird when he drinks: he rests his nose on the edge of the water dish. I think he’s afraid of getting water in it. But if the water level is getting low, he really has to mush his nose against the dish before his tongue can reach the water. We probably shouldn’t have taught him how to drink out of a dish by dipping his snout when he was a pup, but that’s what always worked for our kittens. I guess we’ve scarred him for life.
My cat Orion had an interesting way of using the litter box (before we got a litter maid self cleaning box): he’d perch his four feet on the side of the tray and suspend his butt over the litter. I guess he didn’t want to sit or stand in the litter. He doesn’t do that with the litter maid box (probably because it keeps the litter cleaner), but he does have to come running when he hears the rake start up. I was afraid the cats would be scared of it and refuse to use it, but they don’t mind and Orion in particular is fascinated by it.
Silly critters 