It’s 102° outside, so I decided to give the cats a treat: I dropped a couple of ice cubes in their water dish. You’d think it was the miracle of the loaves and fishes by their reactions. Havoc, the more pragmatic cat, didn’t question it. She just dove in and lapped down a pint of cool water as fast as she could. (And is now paying for it by toddling off to the cat box every 5 minutes to pee.) Pixel, OTOH, was puzzled. She would pat the bowl, pat the water, pat the ice cube, sit back with a curious look on her face. The bowl is hard. The water is soft. But this new water was hard. ¿Que? 
She would do this over and over, from different directions, for 15 minutes. When the cubes got small enough, she took one out with her mouth and set it on the rug. Then she would look from dish to cube, from cube to dish. You could see her mind trying to fit this into her world of experiences. She didn’t give up on the puzzle until the cubes had totally melted.
All in all, an entertaining way to spend a hot afternoon when there isn’t any baseball on. 
I like to toss ice cubes to my dogs. They jump up and capture them in midair, then crunch and chomp gleefully. I call the doggie ice cubes “water bones.”
You might want to watch doing that-they could choke on the ice cubes, and if the water gets too cold, it might upset their stomachs.
Sounds like fun. I think I’ll try it in my own water dish.
when my kids were little, I would fill balloons with water and freeze them. Then I would peel off the balloon and put the “ice bergs” in their wading pool.
Our cats love ice cubes so much that we can’t get ice out of the freezer without them running up, meowing their little heads off. They don’t care so much about the cool water, but they really like to bat it around. 
Being a “literati” and cat-hater, I much prefer the “Hot Tin Roof”.
Every now and then, we buy a big bunch of beef knuckles, which I roast and then boil for broth. The knuckles get frozen, and every now and then, we give the dog a “bonesicle”. She loves them. Of course she loves the unfrozen knuckles, too.
I might have to try giving the cats a couple of ice cubes in their bowl. We have one frighteningly smart cat and two very dumb cats, so it should be interesting.
I’ll have to give that a try next time I visit my parents (and more importantly, the cats).
My personal favourite as far as “puzzling cats with frozen substances” goes has to wait for winter and one of the rare snow falls around here, but it is highly amusing. The one cat loves to try to catch snowballs. However, if he misses, he goes to the spot where it landed and goes nuts searching for the flying object that is now indistinguishable from the rest of the ground cover. The only way to distract him is to throw a new snowball, which just starts the cycle over again.
The one time I put an ice cube into the cat’s water bowl, she found it highly suspicious and, rather than drinking, spent her time with her paw in the water, trying to fish the cube out.
She will occasionally play hockey with an ice cube if I drop one on the kitchen floor, but I don’t think she cares for them in her beverage.
One of my cats will actually jump up on the coffee table and try to steal ice cubes out of your drink if you don’t watch her.
We’ve been giving icecubes to the cat in her water dish since she was a kitten. She loves it! She’s a spoiled kitty - ice-chilled Brita-filtered water. What a snob.