There may be a surprising reason behind the mysterious blue dogs that recently roamed the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Photos taken earlier this year show several dogs with bright blue fur wandering around the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, sparking widespread speculation online, including theories about radiation exposure and mutations.
However, a scientific adviser to the organization that cares for the strays says these ideas “couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“The blue dye probably came from an overturned bowl where the dogs were rolling around in poop, as dogs often do,” Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina said on the Dogs of Chernobyl Facebook account.
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Photos taken earlier this year showed several dogs with bright blue fur wandering around the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. (Clean Futures fund via Storyful)
Mousseau noted that this behavior is similar to the way some dogs are drawn to litter boxes.
“The blue color was just a sign of the dog’s unsanitary behavior!” said Mousseau. “As any dog owner knows, most dogs will eat just about anything, including feces!”
Despite speculation on social media, the dogs’ blue fur “does not reflect any form of mutation or evolutionary adaptation to radiation,” he added.
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Dogs of Chernobyl, the program that cares for the approximately 700 dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, first shared images of the blue-hued dogs in October. (Clean Futures fund via Storyful)
Dogs of Chernobyl, the program that cares for the approximately 700 dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and is affiliated with the nonprofit Clean Futures Fund (CFF), first shared images of the blue-hued dogs in October.
At the time, the group had been unable to capture the animals to determine the source of their unusual color.
“We are on site capturing dogs for sterilization, and we came across three dogs that were completely blue,” Dogs of Chernobyl posted on Instagram. “We don’t know exactly what is going on [on]. … We don’t know the reason, and we’re trying to get a hold of them so we can find out what’s going on.
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FILE PHOTO: Two stray dogs with bright blue fur walk down the street. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
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Many dogs were left behind after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, when more than 120,000 evacuees were told to leave immediately, CFF said.
“The evacuees were not allowed to take anything they could not carry, and their pets had to be left behind,” the CFF website notes. “They were told they would return in three days, but they were never allowed to return. Their pets were abandoned.”
