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. After her work for him became public a few years ago, her waitlist ballooned to two months, she said.

From her tiny Buenos Aires apartment draped in wind chimes and dream catchers, Melamed, 67, charges pet owners $US35 ($50) an hour to communicate with their dogs, cats, turtles and birds to find out what is ailing the animals, where they are hiding or how they are doing in the afterlife. She says she needs merely a photo of an animal to perceive its emotions and thoughts, typically via sensations in her body.

“How does it work?” she said. “I don’t know. I only know that it works.”

She represents what appears to be increasing global interest in the business of pet telepathy, notwithstanding an absence of scientific evidence.

While there are no reliable statistics on the industry, self-proclaimed animal communicators and their clients have proliferated on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Popular animal communicators on social media say business is booming.

”When I started out, I was pretty much alone,” said Cindy Brody, a communicator from Woodstock, New York, who has been in the business for nearly 40 years. Interest took off several years ago, she said, and now her waitlist was nearly a month long. She holds up to 20 sessions a week, charging $US275 an hour. “It’s our time now,” she said.

Clara Martín, an animal communicator from Madrid, said her clients were also multiplying, including a wild-animal sanctuary in South Africa and a man living with 23 cats in Japan. “People understand their animals have something to say,” she said.

Melamed said she first noticed her powerful intuition as a child when she could predict correct answers in guessing games. But she never cultivated those abilities during a career in veterinary medicine and bacteriology. Then, in 2008, she read a book about communicating with animals and began taking courses.

Two years later, a horse she was working with stepped on her, but when she telepathically forgave it, she said her pain went away. “I realised there was something much deeper going on,” she said.

Over two visits to her home, I watched Melamed work. (Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has read animals’ minds remotely.) She looked at photos of cats and dogs, closed her eyes and, according to her, connected with the animals almost instantaneously. Stressed animals could make her body feel tense, she said, while lost pets had made her smell things that provided a clue to their whereabouts.

“Sometimes what I feel is difficult to put into words,” she said. “I try to be as reliable as possible.”

In one case, she said she asked a dog with persistent diarrhoea if it had a message for its owner. “‘Tell her that I’m not her grandmother’,” Melamed recalled the dog responding. The owner was stunned, she said, and admitted she had called the dog her grandmother’s name because of its gait, but would stop. “From that communication onwards, the dog stopped having bloody diarrhoea,” Melamed said.

Clara Quattrucci, 65, said she began booking regular appointments with Melamed two years ago after she helped her cocker spaniel, Mia, recover from the emotional trauma of an attack from another dog. “It honestly blew my mind,” she said.

Dozens of people now advertised pet-psychic services in Buenos Aires, up from just a handful a decade ago, she said. That is in part thanks to Melamed. She estimates she has trained about 700 people in her pet-communication workshops.

“We’re all capable,” she said. “The only thing that blocks us is our belief we can’t.”

She even taught the person she believes took her place working with Milei’s dogs: the president’s sister.

Karina Milei, who is arguably Argentina’s second most powerful government official, showed innate talent in communicating with animals, Melamed said. She took Melamed’s weekend workshop around 2019, and then texted Melamed for months after for more guidance. Shortly after, she said, Javier Milei stopped hiring her.

Karina Milei did not respond to a request for comment.

Melamed said she voted for Javier Milei and looks back fondly on their time together. After Conan died, she said Milei hired her to communicate with the dog’s genetic replicas. They were rambunctious puppies, anxious about their new home, she recalled. “They all have different personalities,” she said. “Even though they are all clones.”

Milei, a libertarian economist, named four of the five clones after libertarian economists. The fifth he named Conan. It is that dog that Milei says is a reincarnation of his original pet, Melamed said, noting it immediately knew the layout of his house.

“I think it’s very likely,” she said. When she communicated with that clone, she added, “there was a feeling of familiarity.”

Her endorsement of the theory could mean a lot to Argentina’s president, who seemed to think highly of Melamed’s apparent powers. At Melamed’s apartment, a book written by Milei had a message she said he had scrawled on its inside cover.