SIX dogs suffered from sudden death for unknown reasons Tuesday and Wednesday in a residential estate in Nanshan District. The dogs all whined, vomited and twitched before their tongues turned blue and they died, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

    The dog owners who lived in the Dachong Xincheng estate suspected that the dogs had been poisoned since they had all smelt or eaten chicken bones at a terrace garden in the estate before dying. A police and forensic investigation was carried out after the incident, but the results have yet to be released.

    The dead dogs were all walked outdoors Tuesday. One Husky named Niunan was only 8 months old. Its owners, surnamed Zeng and Chen, walked it in the terrace garden on the third floor of the building Tuesday, and saw that it had eaten something, but they took no notice of it.

    “I took it downstairs at about 9 o’clock this morning, and just when we got to the same area in the garden it suddenly began twitching, screaming, whining and spitting up blood, and soon came to the point of dying,” said Chen on Wednesday.

    Although Chen took the Husky to a hospital immediately, it died before a doctor could give it a physical exam. “Its symptoms seemed likely caused by food poisoning,” the doctor said.

    Another dead dog, a Samoyed called Shiqi, died in a similar way. Its owner walked it at about 8 p.m. Tuesday. It suddenly started whining in his living room at 3 a.m. and stopped breathing 10 minutes later, said its owner, surnamed Huang.

    “Shiqi was very healthy, and had been given its prophylactic vaccinations. My roommate often walks his dog with me, but he didn’t go out Tuesday night, and his dog was fine,” Huang said.

    According to many dog owners in the estate, there were a lot of chicken bone remains on the ground in the terrace garden, and almost all of the dogs that died suddenly had smelt or ingested those bones. “We think the bones were placed there on purpose,” said one of the pet owners.

    Zeng recalled that a conflict had happened in the estate due to some dog owners failing to keep their dogs in a proper way.

    “These cases were bad, but we didn’t realize such a serious situation would happen,” Zeng posted in an online message to commemorate his dog Wednesday, but he received some negative remarks in support of poisoning the dogs.

    Such incidents also happened last month in a housing estate in Bao’an District, where more than 10 pet dogs died in a short period. Officials with the Patriotic Health Campaign Committee Office ruled out that sanitation done by the property management company in the estate was to blame for the dogs’ deaths, but couldn’t decide whether the cause of death was food poisoning.

    (Zhang Qian, Liu Shiyang)