A chain of Vietnamese street food cafes Lao Lee launched sales of special water for pets in Moscow. A bottle costs 199 rubles ($3) and supposedly saves pets from toxins and bad breath.

“Take it, it helps from a hangover!” the cashier girl at a cafe near the Mendeleyevskaya metro station seems to be joking. People in line smile, take pictures of small bottles with a bright red label, which depicts a four-legged friend and the slogan: “Good Water — A Happy Pet”.

These bottles appeared on the shelves of Lao Lee cafes last week. Some of the visitors posted their photos on social networks, and readers began to crack jokes. “Anything with a mouse flavor?”, “Is a Versace bowl included?”, “Any news on water for parrots?”.

Representatives of the catering establishment admit they were ready for a sarcastic reaction.

“25 years ago, everyone laughed at bottled mineral water in supermarkets. Today we don’t drink tap water,” said Mariam Akopyan, the cafe's marketing director.

In her words, dog and cate water is supplied from Saint Petersburg, from a newly opened plant.

“We distill tap water, add ozone, oxygen, and micronutrients that pets need. Proportions are slightly different, so dogs and cats have separate types of water,” representative say.

However, the chemical composition of water for cats, indicated on the label, completely coincided with water for dogs. No difference in taste either. By the way, producers assure: water is useful for both pets and their owners.

“Today there are a lot of unhealthy chemical components in dry food, in ordinary meat, fish,” Ms. Akopyan notes. “They have a bad effect on the body, cause urinary stone disease — a real scourge of dogs and cats. Using water intended for them, they recover faster in the postoperative period, amber acid eliminates toxins, bad breath disappears. This water is also more useful than normal to humans. It resembles a weaker Essentuki.”

Nevertheless, animal care professionals are skeptical about the novelty.

“The same minerals are part of ordinary water for people,” said Natalia Kornilova, chief physician at the Radenis Veterinary Clinic. “At the same time, there is no special difference in physiology: human and cat stomachs perceive water in the same way. As for the urinary stone disease, no water could help in the fight against it. The same with bad breath — in 90% of cases, it is a consequence of teeth and oral cavity diseases. In my opinion, the idea of pet water is complete nonsense. And it's definitely not worth that kind of money. By the way, a similar story — water for kids, so popular with parents. It is the same as for adults, but many moms and dads fall for a trick.”