Dogs in Peoria neighborhood dealing with mystery illness

Dogs in Vistancia neighborhood dealing with mystery illness

FOX 10's Jennifer Martinez reports.

PEORIA, Ariz. - A mystery illness has hit more than a dozen dogs in a Peoria neighborhood, and their owners have no idea what's causing it.

One neighbor says at least 30 dogs in the Vistancia area have fallen ill and they all have one thing in common: the grass in the neighborhood.

Diarrhea, bleeding, and vomiting. All of those were symptoms Jenna Melhorn's dog experienced last week.

"Around the clock sick, like he couldn’t stop," Melhorn said. "It was unusual for him, and I kind of correlated it with the fact that they had put stuff on the grass a week or two ago. Then my other dog started getting sick."

Jenna said she was going to take her dogs to the vet, but opted out when a neighbor whose dog was sick recovered after a few days.

Her suspicion took her to Facebook, where she heard nearly 30 dogs became sick.

"122 comments of people in the entire Vistancia area saying their dogs have been sick," Melhorn said. "Some took them to the vet. Some spent $1000 getting testing done to figure out what was wrong and couldn’t find out what’s wrong - within a week they were better."

Dogs in the Vistancia neighborhood started to fall ill around two weeks ago. Jenna believes there's a grassy area where the dogs play that could be the culprit, but only two of her three dogs became sick.

"My oldest one, luckily she didn’t get sick - she hates walking on the grass, she doesn't ever really go on it," Melhorn said. "They eat the same food, they drink the same water. There’s nothing from the house they could’ve gotten into, so it was kind of just the process of elimination of where [it] was coming from and how other dogs in the neighborhood were sick with the same thing."

FOX 10 reached out to the Vistancia Animal Hospital where a number of neighbors took their dogs, but they refused to comment.