Buenos Aires Herald 
How many cloned dogs does President Javier Milei have? What breed are they? Are they all alive? These are all questions that will now go unanswered after Treasury Prosecutor Rodolfo Barra ruled that the pets are part of the president’s private life and therefore not subject to public information requests to the government.
The ruling was issued on Tuesday after Presidency Secretary Karina Milei asked Barra to revise the limits of that law. Karina, who is also Milei’s sister, is the head of the secretariat that receives and has to answer public information requests.
She justified her petition to Barra on the grounds that her brother’s dogs are “matters or details related to the personal life of a public official that do not involve public expenditure, are not related to the public administration, and do not involve public interests” in the terms established by the law.
Barra agreed that any details pertaining to functionaries’ private lives are outside the scope of the public information request law’s objectives and should not be answered, as long as they are unrelated to government activity.
He also argued that, in this case, the requests attempted to interfere in the president’s domestic life and that citizens should reflect on the “unnecessary, useless, and non-trascendental” expenditure such questions create, calling them “banal.”
The ruling also listed some of the questions posed regarding the dogs; what breed are they, how many of them are there, what are their names and ages, what brand and type of food do they eat, how are they taken care of, when did they arrive at the presidential home, and how were their cages paid for.
The mystery of Milei’s dogs
The mystery surrounding the president’s dogs has led to endless speculation. Milei has said in interviews over the last year that he has five English mastiffs: Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas. He calls them his “four-legged sons.” They live in big, specially built cages located within the presidential residence’s grounds.
The president, however, has only been seen in public with four dogs when they were puppies. There are no known pictures of the animals as adults. There are also doubts regarding the actual number of them.
According to Juan Luis González, who wrote Milei’s unauthorized biography, El Loco (The Crazy One), there are currently only four dogs in the presidential home. “The president can’t distinguish between what’s real and what his head makes up. What he says isn’t real. Conan died in 2017, and so did two of the clones,” he wrote on X back in March.
Conan was Milei’s first English mastiff, who passed away in 2017. Heartbroken over the loss, he paid US$50.000 for the dog to be cloned. Five cloned puppies arrived in Argentina from the United States in March 2018 — a sixth one died before the shipment. These dogs are theoretically his current pets, although the president has never publicly confirmed whether they are clones or not.
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