Nothing to see here.
No radioactive shrimp from Walmart.
Just some random dogs turning blue pretty close to the site of the world’s biggest nuclear disaster. (So far.)
As you can see, not all the dogs are turning blue, but some of them certainly are:
Wild images show several dogs near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant turning blue, baffling workers taking care of them. The alarming-looking dogs are descendants of pets abandoned after the nuclear disaster there nearly 40 years ago.
They’ve been found wandering around the Chernobyl exclusion zone this month, according to Dogs of Chernobyl, an affiliate of the non-profit Clean Futures Fund that cares for the dogs there.“We are on the ground now catching dogs for sterilisation, and we came across three dogs that were completely blue,” the organisation said in an Instagram post with more than 330,000 views.
But sometimes, just because there’s been a huge nuclear incident just down the road, and just because the stray dogs are in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are turning blue because of the high levels of radiation.
Is that a thing anyway?
No. It turns out that they had got into the leakage from a local Portaloo.
“They appear to have been rolling in a substance that had accumulated on their fur. We are suspecting that this substance was from an old portable toilet that was in the same location as the dogs; however, we were unable to positively confirm our suspicions,” states Dr Jennifer Betz, Veterinary Medical Director for the Dogs of Chernobyl program.
Eww. I think I’d have preferred the radiation thing.