Does Javier Milei have four or five animals in his kennels? The question is not trivial when we know the special relationship of the far-right leader with those he calls his “four-legged children”.
Sigmund Freud nicknamed one of his patients “the Wolf Man”. If the Viennese practitioner were to return to earth (by cloning, for example), and he visited this promised land of psychoanalysis that is Argentina, he could look into the clinical case of a singular “Man with dogs”: the country’s president, Javier Milei. The ultraliberal leader indeed maintains a close relationship with his doggies, whom he calls his “four-legged children” and with which he “dialogue”. To the point that public opinion and the press are moved by this strange link. Sometimes in a tone of mockery.
Thursday April 25, the spokesperson for the Argentine presidency, Manuel Adorni, became angry, during the press briefing he holds every morning, when a journalist wanted to know exactly how many dogs the head of state owned. Why this question ? Because Milei sometimes speaks of four, sometimes of five. The missing animal would be Conan, who disappeared in 2017, but with whom the President would be in telepathic communication thanks to a medium. “To describe the President as a person who speaks with things that do not exist is a lack of respect, barked the spokesperson, in response to the reporter. It’s a disrespectful question, and it’s intruding on your family.”
Cloning to replace Conan
The dogs are therefore well “family”, since the 53-year-old president has no biological descendants to date. He also became single again since he announced, on April 12, just before his meeting with Elon Musk in Texas, the end of his affair with his fiancée Fatima Flórez, because their respective obligations – as a comic artist for her, as President of the Republic for him – left them little opportunity to see each other.
The question posed to the spokesperson followed an exchange between Milei and his left-wing predecessor, Alberto Fernández, who denounced on Twitter (renamed X) on Thursday the policy of budget cuts “inhumane, brutal and unnecessary” of the former economist. By adding : “I, my dog, who is alive, does not advise me, and the “forces of heaven” [expression fétiche de Milei, ndlr] don’t send me signals.”
The doubt expressed by the journalist is due to the status of Conan, who died in 2017, before the ultraliberal tribune entered politics. In the biography El Loco (“the madman”) by Juan Luis Gonzáles, published in 2023, we can read that Celia Melamed, a medium specializing in “animal telepathy”, brought Milei a “help with bereavement work” after the death of his loved one, an English mastiff weighing more than 100 kg. To replace it, he used the services of a cloning laboratory in the United States, a country where this practice is authorized. Result: four copies of the late Conan brought back to Argentina.
The puppies bear the names of economists admired by the President, all theoreticians of ultraliberalism: Milton (for Friedman), Murray (for Rothbard), Robert and Lucas (for Robert Lucas). They live in kennels set up in the presidential residence of Olivos, after work that Milei claims to have financed from his own pocket and not from the state budget. This menagerie is hidden from public curiosity: there are almost no photos, and none recent, of the “four-legged children”. Apart from a gag image, generated by artificial intelligence, that Milei had posted on her Instagram account with the caption: “Family album”.
“The subject is the mental health of the President”
Let’s return to the question that torments journalists. At the beginning of April, on CNN, Javier Milei claimed to spend time every morning with his “five dogs” before going to work. So who is the fifth? The ghost of Conan, a new clone of Conan, or a new arrival? Pushed to his limits, the spokesperson, very annoyed, decided: “If the president says there are five, there are five and period.”
The medium Celia Melamed, who has become a celebrity, provided an interesting clue: Milei would have confided to her that one of the puppies, arriving at the house for the first time, would have gone directly to the kibble reserve. “He seemed to know the place,” affirmed the head of state. Disturbing indication of Conan’s reincarnation, isn’t it? “It seems like it’s a joke. But the subject is the mental health of the President,” reframed to AFP Juan Luis González, the journalist author ofEl Loco, who added: “We can understand many of the government’s decisions through Milei’s instability.”
Since the media skirmish, the canine theme has invaded Argentinian social networks. “Without science, no Conan!” Or “The public university exists, Conan does not!” expressed students in the fight for the defense of higher education, the target of savings measures “with a chainsaw”, Milei’s favorite tool. For their part, animal rights activists responded with a very serious message: “Don’t clone animals, come and adopt them from our shelters.”
