From our “What Was She Thinking” department, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is in the news this weekend because she shot and killed her dog.
We know this because Noem wrote about it in her autobiography, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” The book will be out on May 7, according to Amazon but someone at Amazon decided the book would benefit from some pre-publication buzz. They handed an advance copy to the far-left publication, The Guardian.
Mission accomplished. The media is buzzing.
Noem, who has been prominently mentioned as a possible running mate for Donald Trump, was trying to demonstrate that she “believes sometimes difficult tasks must be carried out, and that she is not afraid to do so,” according to the Hill. That might be the most charitable take on the matter.
The “difficult task” was the execution of her dog, a wire-haired pointer named “Cricket.” Cricket was, according to Noem, an aggressive, fun-loving dog as many pointers are. But Cricket refused to be trained. Even after fitting the dog with an electronic collar, Cricket still resisted being obedient.
The last straw occurred on a hunting trip. Noem writes that she thought Cricket, who was only 14 months old, would benefit from hunting with older, more experienced dogs. Instead, Cricket blew up the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
On the way home from the hunt, Noem stopped to talk to a local family when Cricket escaped the pick-up truck and made a bee-line straight for the family’s chickens. She watched Cricket “grab one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
Bad dog.
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin.”
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
After dispatching poor Cricket, Noem decided the day’s killing wasn’t done. Her family owned an un-castrated male goat that was “nasty and mean.” Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children.
Just after killing the offensive goat, Noem’s children arrived home on the bus.
“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Noem defends her actions of putting down Cricket and the smelly goat as part of life on the farm. I have no doubt that’s true. But it’s also true that 80% of American voters do not live on farms and will take a decidedly different view of the affair. And 80% of Americans love dogs and the thought of shooting one is so horrific that Noem, as a potential VP pick and any other office she might seek in the future, is finished.
We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024
Democrats were having a field day with Noem’s admissions.
There’s far too much demonization in our politics. I mean, just because MAGA types have bad ideas doesn’t mean they’re the kind of people who would shoot puppies.
Oh, wait.https://t.co/e9CmIwsP5k
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 26, 2024
Republicans weren’t too pleased either.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as director of strategic communications in the Trump White House and now is a co-host of The View, wrote: “I’m a dog lover and I am honestly horrified by the Kristi Noem excerpt. I wish I hadn’t even read it. A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained. A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them.”
“Dogs are a gift from God. They’re a reflection of his unconditional love. Anyone who would needlessly hurt an animal because they are inconvenient needs help,” Griffin wrote in a separate post.
The Guardian calls this the greatest understatement of the 2024 campaign: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.”
Uh-huh.