The hardline Iranian parliament has slammed the latest fashion of keeping pet dogs by drafting a bill to criminalise the owning of dogs in private apartments or owners being found with them in public places.
The police chief of Tehran Hossein Sajedinia had declared last week that cars would be seized if there were dogs in them, along with the pets, the Scotsman reports.
Keeping expensive pedigree dogs has become fashionable in northern Tehran despite the fact that canines are considered 'unclean' in Islamic tradition.
The latest bill states that owning dogs is a 'blind imitation of vulgar western culture'.
Similarly, hardliners view jeans as 'decadent', as they believe that it could make youths infertile because they overheat the testicles.
The state-run television reportedly tried to scare men off wearing jeans recently by interviewing a young pundit who claimed that they affect fertility, and also added that the word 'jeans' comes from 'jinn'— meaning ‘spirits able to assume animal or human form’ in Islamic texts.
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now battling for his survival, has often voiced his opposition to any crackdown on the dress code over concerns that it could damage his government''s popularity.
His hardline rivals, however, claim that he has been bewitched by a power-hungry, 'deviant' faction in his camp that is plotting to sideline Iran's clergy.