STRAY dogs in a small Indian town have been turning blue — and not in the melancholy sense.

Locals in the industrial neighbourhood of Taloja outside of Mumbai have posted a number of pictures on social media showing dogs exhibiting a bright blue coat, leading baffled residents to naturally question what was causing the bizarre phenomenon.

The pretty pooches might look kinda cool, but the apparent reason for their abnormal appearance is anything but.

Local activists say the discolourment is caused by chemical pollutants in a local river of the industrial town. A nearby factory has been blamed for dumping chemicals including some sort of cerulean dye in to the river where the dogs sometimes swim.

Environmentalists in the area were even able to get the company thought to be responsible momentarily shut down after filing a complaint to the provincial Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB), which concluded the plant was indeed releasing a mysterious blue dye into the Kasadi river. The river flows through an area with hundreds of factories.

“We had submitted our complaint letter along with a few photos (taken) by the local activists showing how the stray dogs near Kasadi river were turning blue in colour due to chemical pollution,” activist Arati Chauhan of Navi Mumbai Animal Protection Cell told the Times of India.

The water is so polluted in this Indian industrial area it is turning stray dogs blue. pic.twitter.com/OpH4hw3KoR — Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 22, 2017

The company responsible has not been named and while it’s unclear exactly how many dogs have been affected, the good new is they appear to be healthy after being cleaned up.

“The dye is possibly water based as it washed off after two regular baths,” an animal care worker told National Geographic.

India is home to some 30 million dogs, of which many are strays. But the animals are protected under law and in May the country passed sweeping regulations enacting new animal protection policies to provide necessities like food and shelter and curtail indiscriminate breeding.

The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board says it will release a report into the blue dogs in the coming weeks.