How do cats drink water?

By the MeowWise team · Published 1 November 2026 · Last reviewed: 1 November 2026

Cats drink by lapping, but not the way dogs do. A cat curls the tip of its tongue backwards, so only the smooth top surface touches the water, then pulls the tongue up so fast that a thin column of water follows it into the air. The cat closes its mouth on the top of that column before gravity drags it back down. A house cat does this about four times a second, and its chin stays dry.

What high speed video showed

The mechanism was worked out by Pedro Reis, Sunghwan Jung, Jeffrey Aristoff and Roman Stocker, who published it in Science in 2010. They filmed domestic cats with high speed cameras, including Stocker's own cat, and also studied a tiger, a lion and a jaguar at Zoo New England, plus online videos of big cats drinking.

The films showed that the cat's tongue does not scoop. According to MIT's summary of the study, the top of the tongue is the only surface that touches the liquid. Water sticks to it, much as water clings to your palm when you touch the surface of a pool, and as the tongue rises quickly a column of liquid is pulled up behind it. The cat then shuts its jaw and pinches off the top of the column. If it waited too long, the column would break and fall back into the bowl.

Inertia against gravity

In the paper's words, the cat "exploits fluid inertia to defeat gravity and pull liquid into the mouth." The faster the tongue moves, the more the water tends to keep moving upward; gravity pulls the other way. To test this, the team built a robotic tongue that moved up and down over a dish of water, so they could vary speed and size systematically.

The balance between those two forces sets how fast a cat should lap. The researchers' model predicted how lapping frequency should change with body size, and measurements across the cat family (Felidae) fitted the prediction. Big cats, with larger tongues, lap more slowly than house cats. MIT reported that for cats of every size the ratio of inertia to gravity came out at almost exactly one, which is why the authors suggest the same lapping mechanism is shared across the cat family.

Do water fountains make cats drink more?

Many owners buy fountains because cats seem to like moving water. The studies so far are small, and they do not show a big effect.

In a 2010 study in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, David Grant measured 24 hour water intake and urine concentration in 13 healthy pet cats when water came from a bowl and when it came from a fountain. One cat stopped drinking from the fountain and developed vomiting and excessive barbering, so it was withdrawn. In the other 12 cats, intake was slightly greater from the fountain, but urine concentration did not differ significantly. The author concluded that the fountain failed to substantially increase water intake or dilute urine, and that a longer, larger study could clarify things.

A 2019 study by Robbins and colleagues, in the same journal, tested 16 laboratory cats fed dry food. Each cat spent two weeks with each of three bowl types: still, circulating and free falling water. Fourteen cats finished. Average daily water intake, urine volume and urine specific gravity did not differ significantly between the bowls, although three individual cats showed a clear preference for one type, and those preferences pointed in different directions. The authors concluded that bowl type had no appreciable effect on intake overall.

So a fountain may suit some cats, but the evidence does not support it as a reliable way to make cats drink more.

Food moisture matters more

A lot of a cat's water can come from its food. In a small 2011 study in the British Journal of Nutrition, Buckley and colleagues fed six cats the same dry food with water added to reach 6.3, 25.4, 53.2 and 73.3 percent moisture, for three weeks each. The cats drank less from the bowl as their food got wetter, but on the wettest diet their total fluid intake was clearly higher (about 145 ml a day, compared with about 99 to 105 ml on the others). Their urine was more dilute, and a measure of calcium oxalate crystal risk was lower than on the dry diet.

That fits with the general advice on our cat nutrition guide: wet food is at least 75 percent water, and vets sometimes recommend more of it for cats with urinary or kidney problems. These were small studies of healthy cats, so if your cat has a urinary or kidney condition, ask your vet how best to raise its water intake. A cat that suddenly drinks much more or much less than usual, or strains in the litter box, should be seen by a vet; see cat straining to pee and our cat health guide.

Every paper cited here is listed with its DOI on our cat research page.

General education, not veterinary advice. If you are worried about your cat, contact your veterinarian; in an emergency, go to the nearest emergency vet.