Buenos Aires, Apr. 25 (EFE).- Argentine presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni on Thursday refused to answer a journalist’s question about the exact number of dogs President Javier Milei has at the presidential residence, saying the question was “disrespectful” after doubts were raised about whether the president referred to his dead dog, Conan, as alive.
Journalist Jonathan Heguier told the spokesman during the daily press conference at the Casa Rosada that the number of dogs the president owns is a “concern” of “all Argentines, because if the president has four dogs and sees five, we are talking about a person who sees something that does not correspond to reality. That is why we are interested in the number of dogs.”
“I find it disrespectful to define the president as a person who talks to things that do not exist,” replied the spokesman, who said he had met the dogs but did not say how many he had seen.
This is the second time in a week that journalists have asked the spokesman about the president’s English Mastiffs, which he calls his “four-legged children” and keeps under strict secrecy.
On Monday, Adorni told journalists that “if the president says there are five dogs, there are five dogs and that’s the end of it,” adding, “I don’t understand what difference it makes to you whether it’s four (dogs), five (dogs) or 43 rabbits.”
The controversy arose from a recent television interview in which the president told CNN en Español’s Andrés Oppenheimer that he spends every morning with his “five” dogs; at the beginning of each day, he takes a golf cart around the Quinta de Olivos (presidential residence) and spends an hour with “Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas.”
The original and the clones Before and during the electoral campaign, the president said on several occasions that his first mastiff, Conan, named after the film Conan the Barbarian, died in 2017.
In 2018, Milei paid a Connecticut company called PerPETuate to clone his dead dog using its genetic material. It is unclear whether the procedure resulted in four or five puppies, and whether one of them died shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires.
Milei, who has never married or had children, has said that Conan is his “son” and the clones – which he named Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas, after the liberal economists Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas – are his “grandchildren.”
One of the cloned puppies may have been named Conan, like the original dog, leading to the confusion over the number of current dogs.
The only photos of Milei with the dogs before he decided to isolate them, claiming that they had become dangerous during the pandemic because they had lost their “pack instinct,” show him with four enormous Mastiff puppies, not five.
And the tributes he has paid to them, such as a silver engraving on his presidential baston and a cartoon image he shared on Instagram as his “family album,” feature a central dog, Conan, and four other dogs, the clones, but there is never a second Conan.
Milei’s eccentric relationship with the dogs apparently goes further, according to journalist Juan Luis González, who wrote an unauthorized biography of the president, Milei has claimed to communicate with Conan through a medium, and that his sister, Karina Milei, learned to communicate with the dead dog, who gave him life advice.
At the beginning of his term in office, there were also questions about the high cost of setting up a kennel in the presidential residence for the dogs, which weigh more than 80 kilograms each and cannot be kept together, which the president said he would pay out of his own pocket.
On the streets of Buenos Aires, Milei’s dogs are the stars of billboards, anti-President graffiti and are repeatedly used in banners at demonstrations, where “Conan does not exist” is a frequently repeated slogan. EFE
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