Why Iran is making life difficult for dog owners

Iran’s capital city has banned citizens from walking their dogs, as part of a long-running nationwide campaign against dog ownership.

Announcing the move, police chief Hossein Rahimi said that driving with a dog in the car was also being outlawed.

“We have received permission from the Tehran Prosecutor’s Office and will take measures against people walking dogs in public spaces, such as parks,” Rahimi said.

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These measures “could include confiscation and fines”, reports The Daily Telegraph.

Rahimi told Iran’s state-run news agency Young Journalists Club that the ban was being introduced in response to dogs “creating fear and anxiety” among members of the public.

Dog ownership has been a contentious issue in the Middle Eastern nation since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, reports the BBC.

In recent decades, the authorities have carried out “periodic crackdowns” on people who keep them as pets, according to Time. “Police have confiscated dogs from their owners right off the street; and state media has lectured Iranians on the diseases spread by canines,” the magazine reports.

In 2010, Reuters reported that a senior Iranian cleric had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that dogs were “unclean” and not to be kept as pets.

“Friendship with dogs is a blind imitation of the West,” Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. “There are lots of people in the West who love their dogs more than their wives and children.”

Yet despite such crackdowns, “especially among Tehran’s middle class, dog lovers persist”, says CNN.