I called Maryam Sanei in Tehran a little before 9pm. She had asked me to call her at night, saying she was busy during the day taking care of her dogs, which she calls “kids”.



After a few rings, she picked up, sounding anxious. “I can’t talk right now. We have a kid here who’s badly injured. Can I talk to you in few hours?” She got back to me at 1.30am.

The injured dog, who had now been named Kimia, was found in Lavasan, north east of Tehran. Straying onto a road, a car had left her jaw and one of her legs fractured. Sanei admitted Kimia to her eponymous hospice located in Chahardangeh City in Tehran province, and started raising funds through social media for the surgery. A few days later, Kimia had an operation on her jaw.

Sanei, 37, originally studied at the Civil Aviation Technology College in Tehran to become a flight attendant, but her love for animals led her in a different direction. In April 2012, when Sanei was living with her family in the northern province of Mazandaran, she started taking care of injured animals, mainly dogs. As she had no resources or a shelter, she launched a Facebook page to publicise each case and ask for funds to treat the pooch.

Maryam Sanei with one of her ‘kids’. Photograph: Maryam Sanei

A few months later, Sanei moved to Tehran and decided to work more seriously. By then she had more Facebook followers, with some of them offering to look around for donations.

“I decided to focus on dogs with terrible problems, for example badly injured or handicapped ones, those nobody would get close to and were therefore doomed to die,” she says. “People who knew me would call and let me know about these cases. I would go and take care of the initial treatment. Then we would put their photos on Facebook and let people know how much money we needed to treat them.”

Without a shelter, Sanei would ask her Facebook followers for a temporary home: “One would offer a basement, the other would empty a room and another would say, ‘Put it in my parking lot’. They would host the kid and I would take care of the rest, including taking the kid to the vet.”

Even though people were offering to host some of the dogs, Sanei was short of places. She had to take some of them to a pension and pay for their stay. After a while she couldn’t afford the costs. “At one point I took hold of 14 female terriers that were used for breeding,” she recalls. “They were all sick, so I put them all in a pension. In the end I was left with debts of 23 million tomans” - or $7,600.

It was in the middle of her financial struggles that an American woman, who had been in contact only a few times through Facebook, sent more than $3,000. That helped Sanei rent a 1,000 sq-metre piece of land in Chahardangeh, in the south west of Tehran province in December 2014 and open a hospice for dogs. She started with seven dogs and now has more than 60, even though she says the capacity is 40.

Sanaei’s hospice is located in Chahardangeh City in Tehran province. Photograph: Maryam Sanei

Her initial plan was to bring in injured dogs, take care of them until recovered and then set them free and make space for other injured dogs. But with municipality workers killing stray dogs, she won’t let them go until they have a home.

According to Interior Ministry guidelines, municipalities are responsible for capturing stray dogs, putting up the “useful-purebred” ones for adoption and putting to sleep the “unuseful-infected” ones.

The reality is something else. Every once in a while, a report surfaces about municipalities shooting dogs or killing them by injecting acid. It’s all about money, say animal rights activists. The municipalities receive a state budget to deal with stray dogs, but look for the least costly solutions.

In Mashhad, for example, the municipality pays contractors nearly $10 for killing each dog. It insists the dogs are put to sleep, but animal rights activists say this costs nearly $20. “If the [Mashhad] municipality is giving half of this price to the contractors, then of course the contractor goes after easier and more [financially] beneficial ways for massacring [the dogs],” Ali Kashmiri, an animal rights activist in Iran told the Isna news agency in March 2015.

By paying the contractors less, the municipality also benefits financially. In Mashhad 7,000 strays are killed every year, costing the municipality $70,000, although according to the Tabnak website it annually receives more than $260,000 from the central government. Disposing of the bodies will also cost some money, but as activists say, municipalities still benefit financially. “They kill the dogs with sticks and spades, and put the budget in their own pockets,” alleges an animal rights activist in Tehran.

Over the past few years, there have been reports of municipalities disregarding complaints from the public over the brutal killing of dogs. In June 2014, in Tabriz, locals wrote a letter to the mayor suggesting that when they had complained about staff shooting strays, the workers had threatened to turn their guns on them. In December 2014, widespread complaints erupted in Rasht after municipality workers started blasting stray dogs systematically.

The municipalities say they have no other way to control strays, and that many residents are not happy having the animals on the loose and want the local authority to take action. Last month, Iman Memarian, a veterinarian at the Pardisan Park veterinary clinic in Tehran told Jam-e Jam newspaper that dogs carried rabies and that their excrement could transmit diseases to humans. Illustrating the difficulties in capturing dogs, Reza Ghadimi, the head of a job and industry regulatory agency at the Tehran municipality, told Ilna news agency last month that the municipality had over the past year trained 30 staff to capture stray dogs - and that catching a single dog could take four hours.

Animal rights activists believe that stray dogs should be sterilised and then released. In June 2014, Jila Pour Irani, the manager of Pardis animal shelter in Tabriz told Tabnak her arguments had fallen for years on deaf ears at the municipality. “[We’ve asked them] to send the dogs to our shelter so we can vaccinate them, get rid of the parasites and eventually sterilise them, but no one listens,” she said.

A rights activist in Tehran says the municipality dislikes sterilisation because it would dry up a source of income. “If for example Tehran municipality is determined, it’ll take them three years to capture all the dogs, vaccinate and sterilise them and finally set them free,” says the activist. “But those people in the municipality who are earning money through killing the dogs, don’t want this to happen. To them sterilisation means that in three years they are not going to earn money anymore.”

Animal rights activists have worked with the department of environment on a law that would penalise people who “harass” stray animals that pose “no threat” and would make them liable for fines between $165 and $1650. On 20 February, the department of environment sent the draft law to the vice president Eshagh Jahangiri. Its status is unclear. If the President’s office signs off on the draft, it can refer it to parliament for a final review - and a vote.

Until such a law is passed, Sanei says she will keep her dogs and find a safe home for them. That means some stay at the hospice for months after their treatment is over, despite the costs. Sanei says she spends $3,600-$4,300 every month on the hospice including rent, the workers’ salaries, transport, detergents, blankets, food and medicine. This amount doesn’t cover any surgery.

To cover the costs Sanei looks to social networks, where she asks her followers to pay $3.3 or 10,000 tomans per month. For those living abroad, she has representatives in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. It’s through social networks that Sanei also regularly updates her followers about how their money has been spent.

But Sanei says not everyone helps. “Take Instagram for example. Out of all our Instagram followers, maybe only 40 people help on a regular basis. Unfortunately, we don’t have permanent sponsors.”

Liussa Kiani with Shaazdeh, a blind dog she adopted from Sanei’s shelter in Iran. Photograph: Kilani

She hopes one day to own a land, so removing worries about paying rent. “If we could have a piece of land dedicated to animals, then even if we are not around, nothing is going to happen to these kids,” she says, adding that her ultimate dream is to have a well-equipped animal hospital. “I work with handicapped kids, so that’s always on my mind. For example, there are some devices for hydrotherapy. It has a treadmill in a tub. It’s really one of those things that I dream to have one day so that I can take care of my kids’ hydrotherapy.”

Despite financial hurdles, Sanei and her team work hard and aren’t thinking about giving up. They constantly treat dogs and send them to their new homes either in Iran or abroad. They have sent dozens of dogs abroad including to the United States, Canada, Germany and Sweden.

Liussa Kiani and her husband-to-be in Montreal adopted Shaazdeh, a blind eight-year-old dog, from Sanei in June 2015. Kiani’s mother brought Shaazdeh with her from Iran. “Besides Shaazdeh, my mother brought another dog who was going to be adopted by another family,” Kiani says. “She was a bit concerned as it was her first time taking dogs with her, but she didn’t have to do anything. Ms Sanei came to the airport herself, bought the tickets and checked in the dogs.”

Kilani says she has taken thousands of photos of Shaazdeh, but her favourite one is of the dog at her wedding. “I really love the photos in which we have put a bow-tie around Shaazdeh’s neck,” she says. “He became our life partner.”

The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau