I wish people on the internet that adamantly want to argue would stop to actually read the shit they quote, instead of pretending that a half assed google search is some kind of gotcha. Your peer reviewed article that says otherwise actually doesn’t mentions cancer, not even once. It is about external and internal contamination. It doesn’t assign causality between contamination rates and dogs genetic makeup, whatsoever (it might actually be due to human intervention, feeding them with clean food). I also used cancer just as one example of the effects of radiation, it is not the only way that radiation kills. (I also fail to see what hormesis have the fuck to do with any of the discussion, but I guess you find it a fun scientificoid word that makes you sound smart).

I never said it was a genetic change, but epigenetic adaptation. As in, the things that are not in the genome but affect genome expression and are inherited. There’s a ton of studies on these dogs, they all point to a higher rate of genetic differentiation and fast adaptation due to environmental pressure factors like isolation and inbreeding. It’s not just the radiation, it’s what happens when you let a bunch of domestic animals back into nature.

They are surviving in big part due to human care, which is the only thing protecting them from other stuff like hypothermia during winter and parvovirus. That kills them at a higher rate than radioactive contamination. Yet they still seem to be breeding so fast that neutering them is a perfectly valid option.

But anyways, back to the main point. Here’s the main reason they are good for genetic studies:

Our examination of dogs from Ukraine and neighboring countries in Eastern Europe revealed that both the Chernobyl City and CNPP populations have a similar genetic structure to free-breeding dog populations, reflecting a history of admixture, indicating that dogs have existed in the Chernobyl region for a long period of time, potentially since the disaster, or even earlier. Genetic differentiation from other purebred and free-breeding dogs suggests that the Chernobyl populations have a unique genomic signature, supporting their utility in further genomic studies – The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone

They seem to be genetically distinct enough that they might have some adaptations:

We detected a significant degree of genetic differentiation between the two populations of dogs sampled at the Nuclear Power Plant and in Chernobyl City, along with almost complete clustering at the population level through the DAPC and PCA, corroborating trends that were seen in identity by state clustering analyses in Spatola et al. (in press). […]

we identified genomic regions that have diverse allele frequencies between the populations, including candidate genes such as xrcc4 and cntnap2. Our findings are likely to inform future studies, where we intend to search these genomic regions and candidate genes for variants, novel and previously documented, to further evaluate the degree of local adaptation within the Nuclear Power Plant and Chernobyl City populations. – Population dynamics and genome-wide selection scan for dogs in Chernobyl

So, in summary, the current consensus is:

It’s possible that the dogs that survived long enough to breed already had genetic traits that increased their ability to survive. So perhaps there was extreme selective pressure at the start, and then the dogs at the power plant just remained separate from the city population. Investigating that question is an important next step that we are now working on. – Deep Dive Into Genome of Dogs Within Chornobyl Exclusion Zone Shows Genetic Differences Are Not Due to Mutations

So I reiterate my point. Dogs are no less no more complex than humans. Just like everything, this is survivorship bias. The dogs of Chernobyl are simply the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die. It’s ok to not be an expert at something, I’m not a biologist either (nor a nuclear physicist). But at least I bother to read sources before spouting BS on the internet. Shout out to my bro who actually is a biologist and taught me this factoid and shared the links to these studies.

Also, are you really suggesting that evolution doesn’t occur in small scale? 50 years is 30 generations of dogs, that’s a shit ton of breeding.