South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) is embroiled in controversy after a report from The Guardian revealed her admission in an upcoming book that she euthanized her family’s 14-month-old hunting dog, Cricket, and a goat following a series of aggressive incidents.
The book, titled “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” sheds light on the difficult decisions Noem has had to make in both her personal life and political career.
One such incident detailed in the book involves Cricket, a wirehair pointer, exhibiting uncontrollable behavior during a hunting trip, ultimately leading to the dog attacking chickens and attempting to bite Noem.
Excerpt from The Guardian report:
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.
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.”
[…]
Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.
Noem responded to The Guardian report Friday morning, “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, preorder “No Going Back.””
The Governor defended her actions again on FOX News with Sean Hannity, emphasizing the necessity of making tough decisions on a farm.
“You know how the fake news works,” Noem told Hannity.
“They leave out some or most of the facts of a story. They put the worst spin on it, and that’s what’s happened in this case. I hope people really do buy this book and they find out the truth of this story, because the truth of this story is that this was a working dog and it was not a puppy.
“It was a dog that was extremely dangerous. It had come to us from a family who had found her way too aggressive. We were her second chance, and the day she was put down was the day that she massacred livestock that were part of our neighbors. She attacked me. And it was a hard decision.
“And the reason it’s in the book is because this book is filled with tough, challenging decisions that I’ve had to make throughout my life. And I hope that people understand from this that what the point of this story is is that most politicians, they will run from the truth. They will shy away and hide from making tough decisions. I don’t do either of those. I tell the truth, and I make tough decisions,” Noem said.
WATCH:
Most of the public feedback is disapproving of Noem’s actions.
Every time you talk about this I get more infuriated. Stop pretending this puppy deserved to be executed. I rescue abused, starved, and abandoned dogs that are 100 times harder to deal with. pic.twitter.com/eVYhYIipgT
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 3, 2024
You can't blame the media for [checks notes] reading WHAT YOU WROTE.
You killed a puppy, then bragged about killing a puppy because you thought you'd score political points with puppy killers, and now that it's going bad you're trying to hide behind your kids.
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) May 2, 2024
Oh wait you totally locked yourself in again — EXCELLENT, so you say Cricket had a HISTORY? Then you definitely didn’t fulfill your obligations beforehand. When you have a pet that is “in-training” and aggressive, YOU have a responsibility to contain that dog. You, FAILED.
— Wren (@wrens_dens) May 2, 2024
What do you think? Mouth off in the comments.
