The president, his beloved dogs and the pet psychic

Buenos Aires : At first, there was nothing unusual about Celia Melamed’s new client. His English mastiff was dying, so he hired her to read its mind.

But when she met the man with the messy hair, he kept apologising for his casual outfit. “He told me, ‘Sorry for being dressed like this; I’m always in a suit on television’,” Melamed recalled. “I don’t have a television, so I had no idea what he was talking about.”

The man was Javier Milei, at the time a TV pundit in Argentina known for railing against the government. The mastiff was Conan, soon to be Argentina’s most famous dog. And Melamed, by extension, was about to become the nation’s most well-known animal psychic.

That is because, a few years later, Milei was elected Argentina’s president, and Conan was a symbol of his brash campaign, as well as the genetic model for the handful of clones that are now the nation’s first dogs.

But in that first encounter about a decade ago, Conan was on his deathbed, and Melamed said she was communicating with him via an energy she felt in her chest. She said she relayed Milei’s message that he was desperately trying to save the dog.

“What I remember is that he felt better afterwards,” she said of Milei. “Few people have such an intense connection with their animals.”

Melamed then became his dedicated pet psychic. He kept hiring her for the next two years, she said, including to talk to Conan in the afterlife and to the five clones made with Conan’s DNA. They stopped working together a few years before Milei was elected president in 2023.

Milei and his spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment. He has long made clear that he views his dogs as more than just pets. Milei, who is unmarried and childless, refers to them as his children, and his press secretary has admonished reporters who ask about the animals, saying it is equivalent to snooping into his family.

As a result, the dogs have become a central mystery of Milei’s presidency. Only one has been seen publicly since he was elected president, and there have been frequent rumours that others have died. When Milei suddenly fired much of the presidential residence’s staff last month, Argentine pundits speculated the move had something to do with his dogs, which he has said are kept in separate kennels there.

It has even become common political fodder in Argentina that Milei seeks out his dogs for advice. A top foreign diplomat and a long-time friend of Milei’s, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said they have heard Milei say so.

When asked by journalists about the claim, Milei has responded coyly, saying what happens in his house is private. “If he gives me advice, he’s a genius,” Milei said in 2023, referring to Conan. (Although Conan died in 2017, Milei has suggested that one of the clones is Conan’s reincarnation.)

Asked whether she delivered a dog’s counsel to the future president, Melamed cited client privacy.

Milei was hardly her only client.