Water chlorination too much for pup?

Question

I asked a question about my pup regurgitating too much before but not much has improved since then. If anything, we just got better at limiting it and predicting when she would regurgitate.

An interesting turn of events happened this weekend though. We brought her to the cabin with us (approx. 150 km away) from Thursday to Monday and she didn't regurgitate once. The first time she lapped up a bunch of water after a hike I was just waiting around for it to happen but it never did. When we got home on Monday, she regurgitated within a half hour of being home. Now there's a bunch of variables that changed here but I'm guessing that the biggest is the water source. Our water at home is highly chlorinated from the nearby treatment plant. The water at the cabin is not. We took her same water bowl from home to the cabin so the bowl material was not different.

Has anyone experienced this before? And, is this a likely cause of the issue? There's no difference to me besides taste but I'm a 230 lb (104 kg) man and she's a 3 lb (1.4 kg) puppy. I'm going to try filling her dish with bottled water for the next little bit to see if it changes anything. Any other ideas?

Answer 1

I haven't had alike experience as you and I might be wrong.

The material of which the water bowl is made of could potentially leach minuscule amounts of nauseating chemicals to the water, especially if it's made of low quality plastic. Maybe it's the case that chlorine, which is in fact a highly reactive oxidizing agent, reacts with the otherwise harmless material, hence the difference is puppy's reaction.

Chlorinated water shouldn't theoretically cause vomiting by itself - water chlorination has been used for over 100 years and is so finely tuned that no more chlorine/chloramine than needed is used, and the amounts used should be at most capable of resulting in a mildly unpleasant organoleptic experience.

On the other hand, I cannot guarantee that the water treatment plant in question isn't an exception - maybe the chlorine content is towards the high end of the recommended interval and it is, in fact, the sole cause of vomiting? But I don't think so.

And regarding the weight difference between you and the puppy - it's true that she is much smaller that you, but at the same time the amount of consumed water is also proportionally smaller as well, so I think it shouldn't be a factor.