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Buenos Aires: After finishing a surprising first in Argentina’s presidential primaries in August, Javier Milei grabbed a microphone in front of a raucous crowd and thanked Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas.

“Who else?” he said. “My four-legged children.”

Milei, a far-right libertarian who was the favourite in Argentina’s presidential election on Sunday, would head to the country’s presidential offices, the Casa Rosada, not with a spouse and children, but with five mastiffs he has long called his children.

Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian vying to be Argentina’s next president, at home with his cloned mastiff puppies in 2018. Credit: Marcelo Dubini/Caras via The New York Times

He is, of course, speaking figuratively. Technically speaking, however, those five dogs are not traditional offspring of any animal. They are genetic copies of Milei’s former dog, also named Conan, and were created in a laboratory in upstate New York.

Milei’s five cloned dogs have become objects of fascination in Argentina’s presidential election and a window into his unusual candidacy. For months the national debate has revolved around his ascent, his eccentric personality and his radical economic proposals – like eliminating Argentina’s central bank and replacing its currency with the US dollar – to save the nation of 46 million from one of its worst financial crises in decades.

A supporter of Javier Milei holds a replica of a $US100 bill featuring Milei with a chainsaw.Credit: Sarah Pabst/The New York Times

Milei has made his original dog, Conan, named for the movie Conan the Barbarian, a central player in his backstory, saying the dog saved his life and spent numerous Christmases alone with him when he felt abandoned by others.

He has made the cloned dogs symbols of his libertarian ideals by naming four of them for three conservative American economists: Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

And at his rallies, he has held aloft paintings of his dogs, which he passes out to the crowd before picking up a roaring chain saw, his go-to metaphor for the deep cuts he wants to deliver to the Argentine government.

Milei has also signalled that cloning could find a place in his government. Last month, he said that if elected, he would appoint an Argentine scientist who has dedicated his career to cloning animals as the chair of an influential national scientific council.

“He is considered the national cloner,” Milei said of the scientist, Daniel Salamone. “This is the future.” Milei’s scientific beliefs, including denying humans’ role in climate change, have worried scientists.

Javier Milei, the libertarian presidential candidate for next month’s elections in Argentina, using a chainsaw at a campaign rally.Credit: Getty

After leading in the polls for months, Milei tumbled to second place on Sunday, sending him to a run-off next month that will be an important test of strength for the global far-right movement.

Milei, 53, has attracted attention at home and abroad for his bellicose political style that has drawn comparisons – which he has embraced – to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.

He will face off against Sergio Massa, 51, the centre-left economy minister who finished a surprise first and who will now try to convince voters he can save the nation from the economic turmoil that his government helped create.

Sergio Massa, Argetnina’s economy minister and presidential candidate for the ruling party, speaks outside his campaign headquarters after general elections in Buenos Aires.Credit: AP

Massa earned 36.6 per cent of the vote, to Milei’s 30 per cent, with 98 per cent of the votes counted. Candidates needed to surpass 45 per cent, or 40 per cent with a 10-point margin of victory, to avoid a second round.

Cloning

Milei’s cloned dogs are also an example of a growing trend among wealthy pet owners that is raising tricky ethical questions.

A handful of companies in the US, China and South Korea have cloned hundreds of dogs since the first cloned canine in 2005. Barbra Streisand owns two clones of her Coton de Tulear, while Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg have three clones of their Jack Russell terriers.

To clone his dogs, Milei hired PerPETuate, a company run by Ron Gillespie, 75, who got his start in the world of livestock insemination and now runs a “genetic preservation” firm from the Big Island of Hawaii.

Gillespie said he received an email from Milei in 2014, saying he was interested in cloning Conan. “He said that this dog was his life,” Gillespie said.

For $US1200 ($1900), Milei sent a sample of Conan’s tissue to Gillespie’s business partners, scientists at Worcester Polytechnic University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who used that tissue to grow cells full of Conan’s DNA and then cryogenically freeze them. (Some cells remain frozen in Worcester.)

In 2018, after Conan died, Milei reached out again. He was ready to pay $US50,000, which was the cost of a procedure that would guarantee him at least one clone.

Cloning one dog usually requires more than 100 eggs – or about a year’s worth of eggs from five to 10 canines – which are surgically harvested from donor dogs, Gillespie said.

Dog-cloning technology is largely the same since Dolly the sheep became the first mammal clone in 1997. Scientists remove the nucleus from each donor egg cell, wiping them clean of all their DNA. Into those empty eggs, the scientists insert the cells full of DNA of the animal being cloned.

“Then we stimulate the egg cell with a shot of electricity, and that forms a one-cell embryo that immediately begins to multiply,” Gillespie said.

Ten to 15 of those embryos – based fully on the DNA from the dog being cloned — are then implanted into the uterus of a surrogate dog.

Some bioethicists and animal-welfare groups question the ethics of pet cloning, both for its use of animals to donate eggs and carry cloned fetuses, as well as the fact that there are already millions of unwanted pets.

To clone Milei’s dogs, Gillespie contracted ViaGen Pets, based outside Austin, Texas, the only American company cloning dogs. ViaGen declined to say how many eggs it used to clone Conan.

ViaGen said that in nearly three out of four cases, cloning a dog produces just one clone. In Milei’s case, in 2018, it produced five.

“He was ecstatic,” Gillespie said. Once the clones arrived in Argentina, one began responding to “Conan” and seemed to enjoy the same television show as Milei’s previous dog, so Milei named the clone Conan, Gillespie said Milei told him.

Conan “is literally a son to me”, Milei told an Argentinian news site in 2018. The other four clones “are like my grandchildren”.

He also has said the dogs are a handful. “My house is like Kosovo,” he said on television in 2018. “In two weeks, they’ve eaten almost four armchairs.” Five years later, he has said the largest of the pack weighs 100 kilograms.

On the campaign trail, Milei has largely kept the dogs at a day care, out of sight. But they have remained a part of the debate.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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