It is commonly thought - and most correctly, I think - that cats don't like water. You'll probably never find a cat willing to jump in a pool to "fetch" one of his favorite toys. And although I know some people who bathe their cats, I think it is a matter of their cat having either an unusually placid disposition or a small brain.
But after observing how our many cats behaved around a swimming pool we had at our house in Orange, I’m not sure they recognized that the pool actually had water in it. Our pool had a diving board at one end and a slide at the other. There was rarely a time when one or the other of our three cats wasn't sitting out on the end of either the slide or the diving board washing itself. Dolly, our pretty calico whom we referred to, out of her presence of course, as our "dumb blonde" would sit on the end of the slide, which hung out over the water some three feet, and start grooming herself. She covered every inch of her body with her tongue, totally ignoring the fact that her legs extended out over the edge of the slide more and more – and invariably, with a large plop (as she was a fat cat), she'd drop off the end into the water. She was out of the pool in a flash, her long hair clinging to her body, looking even more senseless than normally. We couldn't help but laugh and she always acted highly affronted, but that never stopped her from using the same place to clean herself again.
Sammy Davis III, our sleek black cat who came knocking at our door one day as a young runaway, preferred sitting on the end of the diving board for his daily ablutions. Having more of a brain than Dolly, he was quite adept at balancing himself and only one time did we see him fall in. He landed in deep water and had to swim -- dog paddle, to describe his stroke more exactly -- from the center of the pool to the side, a distance of probably 8 feet or so. What made it so funny was that he was able to stretch his neck so his head was about a foot above the water. His big yellow eyes were as round as saucers and he looked like a black periscope traveling in our pool. I hate to admit this but when any of us saw a cat on the end of either the slide or the diving board, we would head for the patio to watch the show. The day that Sammy went in we nearly split our sides laughing at him. He was mortified.
Our only cat who didn't go in the water was Spot, who was old and wise and did her grooming on our bed in the night while we were in it. However, a neighborhood cat often came into our back yard, and this cat, whom we called "Red Kitty", for some reason irked the daylights out of old Spot. Spotty was 16 years old and had started moving somewhat slowly and wasn't good for much anymore except chasing Red Kitty out of the yard. She knew Red Kitty was not part of the family and she wasn't going to tolerate her in our yard. One morning Red Kitty somehow made it into our back yard and was nosing around looking for scraps of food. Spot was sitting inside the house, looking out the sliding glass door and ran to the back door to be let out. When we opened the door for her she shot outside as fast as a bullet out of a gun, hissing and growling at Red Kitty, who took off running toward the back fence. The red cat forgot completely about the swimming pool, running into it and then breaking an Olympic record in getting to the other side, almost running on water. In a matter of seconds, all that was left of her was a big wet streak across the cement on the other side of the pool, up a small retaining wall and then up and over the grape stake fence. She herself had been merely a blur.
It was the wet streak she left that convinced us that she did, in fact, swim mightily and depart even faster.
That, and the big smirk on Spotty's aging face.
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