We’ve finally found an issue that unites the country. Just about everyone is disgusted with Kristi Noem for boasting that she shot dead her dog, a 14-month-old puppy she said she “hated.”
If the South Dakota governor thought any publicity was good publicity in her bid to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, she was sorely mistaken about this horrible disclosure.
The story comes from Noem’s upcoming memoir, “No Going Back,” in which she says she took her female German wirehaired pointer Cricket to a gravel pit on her farm and shot her dead for being “less than worthless,” according to the Guardian.
The dog’s crimes for which it needed to be executed? Cricket ruined a hunting trip by chasing birds and “having the time of her life,” and then on the way home, attacked a local family’s chickens.
Noem also boasted in the book that, after killing the dog, she took the family goat to the same gravel pit and shot it because it was “nasty and mean” and smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid.”
Sure, it’s a fact of life on farms and ranches that animals will have to be put down, but to do so in anger, as Noem apparently did, is appalling. The dog was young, and she had failed to train it properly or keep it under control.
She admits she was angry: “I hated that dog. At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.”
That is not normal. It is shameful, and for Noem to regale people with the story, as she has done for years, and then use it to sell books shows shocking judgment.
Four years ago, she was warned that the story would appall most Americans across ideological and party lines, but all she did was add the embellishment that the dog tried to bite her after the chicken fiasco.
Perhaps she had told too many people the story to keep it quiet, but now she claims that she included the anecdote in the book to show she was willing to do the “difficult, messy, and ugly” things that need to be done in life and politics.
What she actually showed was that she will never shake the epithet that has attached itself to her: “Jeffrey Dahmer with veneers.”
