In this work we present and analyse a novel linear and positivity preserving upwind discontinuous Galerkin (DG) approximation of a class of chemotaxis models with damping gradient nonlinearities. In particular, both a local and a nonlocal model including nonlinear diffusion, chemoattraction, chemorepulsion and logistic growth are considered. Some numerical experiments in the context of chemotactic collapse are presented, whose results are in accordance with the previous analysis and show how the blow-up can be prevented by means of the damping gradient term.