Dogs in Iran!

If you are a dog and you live in Iran, you should leave the country immediately!  At least that's my advice.  And the reason you should do this is because a big, important religious man named Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said that people in Iran shouldn't have dogs as pets.  I think it's very mean and unfair of him to say this, and if I ever meet up with him, I will tell him so and maybe even bite him on the leg!

Of course, if I did this, the Ayatollah would send me to doggy jail, which is what he started doing with pet dogs back in 2007, when he first told people that they shouldn't have dogs.  But people kept getting dogs anyway because dogs are people's best friends, and many Iranians were smart enough to know this.  So now this Grand Ayatollah guy made a fatwah, which is a religious ruling, about how people can't have dogs.  And the reason he gives for this is that dogs are unclean.  Which should be an easy problem to fix if you just give all the dogs a bath, but Mom says that "unclean" means something different when you are talking about religion.

And another thing the religious guy said was that having dogs as pets was what people do in the West, and that Iran shouldn't be like the West.  America is in the West, and so are Canada and Europe and South America and Australia and New Zealand.  People who live in all these places know about the wonderfulness of dogs, so they have them in their houses and stuff.  The Ayatollah says that "There are lots of people in the West who love their dogs more than their wives and children."  Which may be true, but I say what's wrong with that?

Anyway, here's something interesting about the doggy fatwah:  it doesn't apply to people who are nomads and wander around with their sheep and goats looking for places for them to eat grass, because these people need dogs to help with herding and guarding their flocks.  In the Iranian language, these dogs are called sage ashaayeri, which means "nomads' dogs."  They come in a bunch of different colors, and some have short hair, and others have medium hair.

The nomads who live in the west part of Iran have most of these dogs.  They are about the size of a border collie, and mostly their job is to guard the animals and also to guard the people's tents.  So these dogs are very fierce with strangers, and they can fight wild animals like wolves, bears, and wild boars.

Anyway, if I ever go to Iran, which I am most definitely not planning to do, I will find some nice nomad family to live with because I don't want to get arrested and thrown into doggy jail!