Dr Jennifer Betz knows exactly what it looks like – mutant, radioactive super-dogs that talk rather than bark.
Last month, Dr Betz’s team spotted three blue dogs in Chernobyl, the restricted area surrounding the epicentre of the 1989 nuclear disaster.
One member filmed the feral dogs as they loitered around the woodland near the Ukrainian ghost town Pripyat, 60 miles north of Kyiv.
‘We wanted to catch them to sterilise them,’ the veterinary medical director of the Dogs of Chernobyl campaign told Metro. ‘We went back every day to find them, but they never showed.’
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The programme is part of the Clean Futures Fund, a nonprofit supporting communities experiencing the long-term effects of nuclear disaster.
Dogs of Chernobyl went to the disaster site from October 5 to 13 to sterilise the dogs, many the descendants of abandoned animals.
‘The last day we were there, we were able to see them from far off in the distance,’ says Dr Betz, 55. ‘The blue colour had been dissipating.’
Almost immediately after the footage of the bright blue dogs was uploaded to the Dogs of Chernobyl TikTok, the clip went viral.
Viewers expressed almost equally immediate concern – were the dogs healthy? Was the footage nothing more than an AI-generated video?
Dr Betz, who lives in Portland, Oregon, however, isn’t worried in the slightest.
‘Obviously, they’ve rolled in something,’ she says, suggesting it was a blue chemical fluid that had leaked out of a nearby broken portable toilet.
The liquid is a type of disinfectant called a quaternary ammonium compound, which is non-toxic to humans.
‘My dog gets into the burn pile, and her whole head is black when she comes out,’ adds Dr Betz. ‘So they roll on things, and they roll in nasty things.’
After the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, hundreds of families were forced to evacuate, leaving behind their homes – and pets.
While local officials spent years trying to exterminate them – wary of disease and radiation contamination – the pet dogs have thrived.
Around 500 stray dogs live around the disaster site, known as the exclusion zone, bonding with local clean-up crews and power plant workers who often feed them.
Nearly half of the dogs live in the immediate vicinity of the power plant, while the others live in Chernobyl City, a residential area nine miles away.
Dogs of Chernobyl, which relies on donations, has neutered some 1,000 dogs and cats since volunteers arrived at the site in 2017. Three Clean Futures Fund clinics also provide veterinary care and administer vaccines.
Some scientists see the zone as a lab to see the impact of chronic, low-level radiation on animals.
Research has shown that the dogs of Chernobyl are genetically distinct from purebred canines. How much the radioactive environment has contributed to their unique genes remains unclear, however.
This isn’t quite the four-headed, cancer-immune dogs that people expect to see. ‘There’s a fascination with Chernobyl and radiation,’ says Dr Betz, who has co-published several research papers on Chernobyl’s dogs.
‘Spider-Man turns after being bitten by a radioactive spider. People want to believe that kind of craziness.
‘So, the fact that they saw a blue dog, they immediately assume that instead of the obvious. Could have been a yellow dog, but blue, for some reason, people see and think radiation.’
Many of the dogs in Chernobyl struggle with birth defects, such as hip dysplasia, which means hip joints are misaligned and unstable.
The reason isn’t radiation, Dr Betz stresses, but inbreeding. Security barriers around the power plant may keep the power plant dogs and the Chernobyl City dogs apart, for one.
‘These are an isolated group of dogs that have been breeding mother to father, daughter to father, for 40 years,’ she adds.
It’s not only dogs that roam Chernobyl – wolves, boars, birds, deer, lynx and the once nearly extinct Przewalski’s horse have been spotted.
Chronic radiation has affected some critters – wolves are more resilient to cancer, birds in the area have smaller brains and frogs have darker skin to protect against radiation.
Given the short life spans of many of these creatures, dogs included, further investigation of radiation-related changes is needed.
As World War Three fears grow, such data would be just as useful for humans as it would be for animals, too, says Dr Betz.
‘What is it going to mean for people in the future should we have another accident like Chernobyl?’ she adds.
‘With what’s happening in the world right now, we can learn from these animals by what we find.’
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