The packs of dogs roaming the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have a lot they can teach humanity about survival—from radiation, harsh winters, and roving predators—and about life in the one of the harshest environments around.
While the events of the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster are well documented, less known is that the residents of the nearby cities were forced to evacuate and leave their pets behind. Today, it’s estimated approximately 700 descendants of those dogs live on in the exclusion zone, scraping out a meager existence. But some people are trying to help.
Meeting a Need
In 2016, the US-based nonprofit Clean Futures Fund (CFF) was founded to create awareness and provide “international support for communities affected by industrial accidents and long-term remedial activities.” CFF’s current areas of focus include the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the Chernobyl worker town of Slavutych, Ukraine.
CFF launched the Dogs of Chernobyl program in 2017 to set up a spay, neuter, and vaccination program to control the large population of stray dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and to help decrease their suffering. The dogs and cats are also given electronic tags and radiation-monitoring collars.
Controlling a Growing Pet Population
Oregon-based veterinarian Dr. Jennifer Betz runs the nonprofit Visiting Veterinarians International, an organization that provides free spay and neuter services and other veterinary-based care around the world where the need is high, to communities that don’t have or can’t afford veterinary care.
Betz was first contacted in 2017 after the initial spay and neuter program was conducted by the original Dogs of Chernobyl team. Betz accepted an offer to head the spay and neuter clinics in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and she became the Veterinary Medical Director and Board Member of the Dogs of Chernobyl program. Since then, she’s run the spay, neuter, and vaccination program every year with the exception of the pandemic and at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The first time Betz visited Chernobyl in 2018, she was greeted by “a lot of dogs everywhere.” The team spent the month spaying and neutering hundreds of dogs. Of course, they first had to catch them.
“Most of them will come close to you because they’re interested and they want some food,” she says. “There’s a handful of them that you can pet and will come up to you because they’re used to the tourists, but the rest of them will stay back. They’re not aggressive, but you can’t really touch them or get that close because they’re semi-feral and scared.”
In 2018, there was a ray of hope that some of these dogs might experience living in a home with a loving family when the team found a litter of two-week-old puppies whose mother had been hit by a car and died.
“We petitioned the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management to allow us to take these dogs and provide them temporary shelter for several months until we can be sure that they were properly decontaminated,” Betz says.
Partnering with the SPCA International, the group was allowed to adopt 34 puppies with tested safe radiation levels to people in the United States and Canada. But she notes, since then “the animals are not allowed to leave the Exclusion Zone, and I haven’t been successful in trying to get any other dogs out, especially since the war.”
Betz and the team go to Chernobyl to set up the clinic twice a year, including October 2022 and June 2023. “During the pandemic, we had an influx of dogs breeding and having puppies,” Betz notes. “That’s why I planned a mission in October of last year because I couldn’t wait much longer.”
Her team spayed and neutered 125 dogs that live around the power plant. “When we went back in June this year, there were no puppies anywhere.” That means, she explains, that out of around 125 dogs, most were effectively sterilized. “There were three dogs that I caught in June that hadn’t been sterilized. They were in heat, but they were not pregnant.” That means that potentially all of the male dogs in the area had been neutered.
2000 Pounds of Food a Week
For now, the biggest issue is getting food to the dogs who have long relied on the workers at the plant (who continue to clean and stabilize the site), and tourists (who were allowed to visit the exclusion zone through official guided tours) to feed them. Since the pandemic and the war, only a skeleton crew remains, and the tours have stopped. To help fill in the gaps, the Dogs of Chernobyl program has been bringing in 850 kilograms (nearly 2000 pounds) of dog food a week.
However, says Betz, “it’s a pretty and very restricted area, and only a few select people are allowed in.” Another difficulty is that the dogs (and many cats) are not getting the exposure to people they used to, which has made them more feral and harder to handle.
“We provide them with the best care that we can and try to make them as happy as they can be,” Betz says.
Unlocking the Secret of the Dogs’ DNA
Timothy Mousseau is a Scientific Research Coordinator at CFF as well as a Professor at the University of South Carolina. He has been studying the effect of radiation on the animal population around the power plant since 1999.
“We started with birds mostly and added insects and microbes and other small mammals,” Mousseau says. Then in 2017, he was contacted by a colleague on the board of CFF who invited him to participate in the next clinic. He accepted, and was able to obtain blood samples of around one hundred dogs from the surgery suite.
“Our goal is to develop a much better understanding of how chronic exposures to these kinds of low-dose sources of radiation might affect whole body systems,” says Mousseau. “We’re hoping that we will learn even more about what the consequences are to this kind of chronic long-term exposure that has become a bigger issue in many parts of the world.”
The dogs are a good population to study in that like people they get the same diseases, and they tend to live together and eat the same food.
“We’re right in the middle of analyzing the genomics data to determine whether or not there’s any signature of the effect of the radiation on their DNA,” Mousseau reports. “We don’t know the answer that question yet.”
What Mousseau says his team has learned is that there is significant evidence of genetic effects of organisms living in Chernobyl over the years. What this evidence indicates exactly, or how these effects will impact the dogs or other organisms, is still being studied. Most of the dogs in Chernobyl rarely live long into adulthood (the average age of the dogs living there is between 4 and 5 years old), making the long-term effects more difficult to quantify.
“They’re out on their own for the most part,” Mousseau says. “They have to defend themselves against other predators and other dog packs. Our gut feeling is that a shortened lifespan is more about being in that kind of harsh environment rather than radiation effects per se. But we’re still working on that question.”
Mousseau confirms that the dogs living around the power plant are quite distinct from the dogs living in the town of Chernobyl. And those dogs are very different from the dogs that are living in Slavutych, the town where the workers lived, and from the village dogs in other parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere in Ukraine. But each pack of dogs is a family, and they have a home at Chernobyl.
“When you visit the power plant, when you come in the front door where the security guards are, there are dogs there who are defending that spot. And then, if you look down the road, you’ll see another group of dogs around 100 hundred yards away, and they’re barking up a storm defending their territory.”
Better Days Ahead
While the Chernobyl dogs’ backstory is bleak, and there is still much that can be done to help them, their adaptability and enduring survival is impressive. That many can still trust humans, and even be successfully adopted as pets, is a testament to the resilience of dogs. Someday perhaps they will even help inform science about the long-term effects of radiation exposure in dogs and other species. And, they have their supporters in Clean Futures who are working towards a net zero population.
Clean Futures Fund is committed to caring for the dogs for the rest of their lives and to continuing the spay and neuter clinics until all the dogs are sterilized. Eventually, with no new puppies being born, the Dogs of Chernobyl will live out the rest of their lives until there are no more stray dogs in and around the Exclusion Zone.