Dogs in Chernobyl mysteriously turned blue?

Claim:

Images authentically show dogs with blue fur near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine.

Rating:

Context

Dr. Jennifer Betz, medical director for the Dogs of Chernobyl program, said there is a “0% chance that the blue color is related to radiation.”

In late 2025, social media users began sharing images allegedly showing dogs with blue fur near the infamous Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine. 

Photos of the strange scene spread on Reddit, Instagram and Facebook. 

These pictures were originally taken by team members of Dogs of Chernobyl, a program that provides care for the descendants of abandoned stray pets in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, an area that officials restricted due to radioactive contamination after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Dr. Jennifer Betz, Dogs of Chernobyl’s medical director, said via email that her team first spotted the blue dogs in early October. Dogs of Chernobyl posted a video of the cobalt-colored pooches on Instagram on Oct. 12 before sharing additional images via Facebook on Oct. 17. 

The videos and images showed no signs of editing or generation via artificial intelligence (AI). In the aforementioned Facebook post, Dogs of Chernobyl shared a screenshot of metadata showing that someone took the pictures on Oct. 6 in Chernobyl. Dogs of Chernobyl has been caring for strays near the nuclear site since 2017 as part of the Clean Futures Fund, a nonprofit organization based in Ukraine that aims to support communities impacted by industrial accidents. The nonprofit is partnered with the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, which manages the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, thus indicating its reputability. 

As such, we have rated this claim true. 

There is a “0% chance that the blue color is related to radiation,” according to Betz, who has co-published several research papers on the impact of radioactive contamination on Chernobyl’s dogs. 

“It is strictly topical and just on their fur and was dissipating by the end of the week,” Betz said. Per Betz, the team encountered three dogs “almost completely covered with a blue substance” during a “catch, sterilize and release campaign” — commonly known as “trap, neuter and return” or TNR in the United States — to help control the population of stray dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. 

Betz and her team tried “several times” to catch the dogs so they could sterilize them but ultimately did not succeed. She suspects that the sapphire substance came from an “old portable toilet that was in the same location as the dogs.” (In case you’ve never looked inside a portable toilet bowl, they often contain a blue liquid used as a deodorizer and to camouflage waste.) 

“However, we were unable to positively confirm our suspicions,” Betz said. 

Betz also noted that her organization marks dogs with a temporary crayon marker, sometimes in blue, on the top of their heads to identify which dogs they have sterilized — but that’s “completely different from the dogs that we encountered that were almost covered head to toe in blue substance.” 

“The dogs appear healthy, as do all of the other dogs that we have encountered during our time in Chornobyl,” Betz added, using the Ukrainian spelling for Chernobyl. “I would suspect, as long as they don’t lick the majority of the substance off of their fur, it would be mostly harmless.”

The organization’s Facebook post sharing images of the blue dogs also dismissed claims that Dogs of Chernobyl faked these images: 

For those of you who are commenting that we are faking these photos or that we are purposly spraying or dying these dogs, or purposely catching them to dye these dogs so that we can make money or spread false information, I don’t know what to tell you except that we don’t have time to be doing things like that nor do we need to do things like. We are confident that the reputation of our organization speaks for itself.

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If you would like to support our work, please do so by following our pages Dogs of Chernobyl and Clean Futures Fund and sharing our information. If you think we are lying about blue dogs, move on and we hope you can find peace within yourself sometime in the near future. 

Snopes previously determined that posts claiming to show a strange new animal “taking over Chernobyl” miscaptioned images of a bald bear.