The mystery behind bright-blue dogs spotted wandering the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has been solved, according to one expert. Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, a scientific adviser to the group that cares for the site’s roughly 700 strays, said in a statement shared on the Dogs of Chernobyl Facebook account that any radiation-mutant narrative could not “be further from the truth.” Instead, he said, the dogs likely picked up their electric hue while rolling in the chemical dye from a spilled port-a-potty—behavior he noted tracks with “how some dogs are drawn to cat litter boxes.” “The blue coloration was simply a sign of the dog’s unsanitary behavior!” Mousseau said. “As any dog owner knows, most dogs will eat just about anything, including feces!” The photos first circulated after the nonprofit-affiliated Dogs of Chernobyl program posted images of three blue-tinted animals, saying staff had been unable to capture them to determine the source. “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,” the organization wrote at the time. Mousseau’s conclusion, however, leaves little mystery. The vivid coloring has nothing to do with radiation and “does not reflect any kind of mutation or evolutionary adaptation.”
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