Images of stray dogs with striking blue coats wandering through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone set off a frenzy of online theories earlier this year. With the backdrop of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe, many quickly imagined radiation-induced abnormalities or strange genetic twists behind the vivid color.
But according to the scientists closest to the scene, those theories could not “be further from the truth.”
Timothy Mousseau, a University of South Carolina researcher who advises the organization overseeing the dogs, says the explanation is far more mundane — and far less dramatic. As he put it on the Dogs of Chernobyl Facebook page, “The blue dye likely came from a tipped over port-a-potty where the dogs were rolling around in the poop, as dogs are prone to do.”
He compared it to a familiar household problem. “The blue coloration was simply a sign of the dog’s unsanitary behavior!” he explained. “As any dog owner knows, most dogs will eat just about anything, including feces!” The behavior, he noted, mirrors the way some dogs are mysteriously attracted to cat litter boxes.
Mousseau further emphasized that none of the dogs’ unusual appearance signals anything dangerous or biologically altered. Their fur does “not reflect any kind of mutation or evolutionary adaptation to radiation,” he said.
Dogs of Chernobyl — a program supported by the Clean Futures Fund (CFF) that provides care for the roughly 700 strays still living around the former nuclear plant — first posted the images in October. Staff at the time had not yet managed to bring the brightly colored animals in for examination.
“We are on the ground catching dogs for sterilization, and we came across three dogs that were completely blue,” the group wrote on Instagram. “We are not sure exactly what is going [on]. … We do not know the reason, and we are attempting to catch them so we can find out what is happening.”
Those dogs are descendants of pets abruptly abandoned in 1986, when over 120,000 residents were forced to leave. As CFF recounts, “The evacuees were not allowed to bring anything that they could not carry, and their pets had to be left behind.” The site notes, “They were told they would return in 3 days, but they were never allowed to return. Their pets became abandoned.”
{Matzav.com}
I seriously doubt there is that much bluing from port-a-potties left over from decades ago.
Anyway, wouldn’t have all the dogs wandering around have rolled in it and used it up long before now?
It’s the blue hair-die the farmers use.
They were listening to Margaret Brennan cover-up for, I mean interview, Jasmine Crockett.