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It’s been close to 40 years since people have lived in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what is now Ukraine. However, the irradiated region is still home to plenty of wild animals—including hundreds of dogs that have caused a bit of a stir after some of them suddenly started turning blue.
In 1986, the world narrowly avoided an unprecedented disaster that most people simply refer to as “Chernobyl,” the name of the nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union that suffered a catastrophic meltdown early in the morning of April 26th.
Soviet officials desperately attempted to keep the incident under wraps while launching an operation to contain the literal fallout of a disaster that forced the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat as responders exposed themselves to deadly levels of radiation in an ultimately successful attempt to mitigate the damage.
It’s believed 30 people died from radiation sickness in the immediate wake of the disaster, although the Soviet government initially pegged the death toll at just two. Thousands of others have likely passed away prematurely due to the long-term effects of exposure, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from the Chernobyl “exclusion zone” that measures around 1,000 square miles.
If you’ve seen HBO’s fantastic Chernobyl miniseries, you’re likely aware some soldiers were tasked with hunting down and culling livestock and pets in an attempt to curb the spread of contamination. However, there were some dogs that managed to dodge that extermination campaign and subsequently began to reproduce.
Those survivors are believed to be responsible for many of the dogs that still roam the exclusion zone today, and a few of them have managed to make headlines thanks to an unexpected change in their appearance.
People taking care of dogs in the vicinity of Chernobyl are trying to figure out why they’ve started turning blue
The so-called “Chernobyl dogs” have attracted plenty of attention over the past few decades, as they provide scientists with a virtually unparalleled opportunity to chronicle the impact of nuclear contamination across multiple generations of animals (another study examining wolves in the region found they may have developed a resistance to cancer).
There’s no real way to know exactly how many dogs roam the area, but there are hundreds of canines that are cared for by the soldiers who keep people away from Chernobyl and the many other workers who are still tasked with monitoring the site.
There’s an Instagram account devoted to the animals, and one post managed to garner plenty of attention thanks to a video that showed some of the dogs had started to turn blue earlier this month.
It does not appear the change in hue has anything to do with radiation, as all signs point to the dogs being tinged after being exposed to some sort of chemical. That was the cause of a similar phenomenon in Russia in 2021, which was determined to have stemmed from the dogs rolling around in dye at an abandoned industrial plant.