South Dakota Gov. and VP hopeful Kristi Noem (R) tried to build her national brand two years ago on the back of her attacks on transgender people’s rights. But now she’s facing criticism for proudly telling the story of how she shot her own dog because it was difficult to train, a story she said shows that she’s willing to do difficult tasks.
The disturbing story appears in excerpts reported on by The Guardian from Noem’s upcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes. “I hated that dog.”
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She wrote that the dog was “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog.”
Noem said that Cricket attacked another family’s chickens. The dog “grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” The dog “whipped around to bite me,” she said, when she tried to stop it.
She called the dog “a trained assassin” and said that she apologized to the other family and wrote them a check to pay for the chickens.
“At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.” Noem got her gun and took the dog to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” Noem wrote. “And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
After killing Cricket, she recounted, she took a male goat to the gravel pit and shot it as well because it was “nasty and mean.”
Her daughter Kennedy “looked around confused” when she was dropped off at the bus stop.
“Hey, where’s Cricket?” the daughter asked.
“I guess if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote.
Out clinical psychologist and niece of the Republican presidential candidate, Mary Trump, had a strong reaction to the story.
“Kristi Noem is telling everybody that she murdered a puppy because she wants to be Donald’s VP and she thinks the story will appeal to him,” Mary Trump wrote on X. “She’s not wrong.”
The Biden-Harris campaign also called Noem out.
“Anyone who has ever owned a birddog knows how disgusting, lazy and evil this is. Damn,” said Montana Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse.
Liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor called Noem “Jeffrey Dahmer with veneers” while discussing the story.
Noem shared a screenshot of the Guardian story and stressed that her book gives “real honest, and political INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping” and linked the page to preorder her book.
Noem has good reason to believe that she wouldn’t have told the story if she were a better politician.
Politicians have long used pets like dogs to soften their image, and appearing cruel towards animals can turn voters off. Mitt Romney, for example, was criticized after he told the story about when he put his family dog, Seamus, in a carrier on the roof of his car while driving from Massachusetts to Canada for a family vacation in 1983. When questioned about it, he said that the dog liked its carrier.
