Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota and a candidate to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate on the Republican ticket, admits in her new book that she killed a family puppy.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” she wrote in the book, according to the Guardian, which says it has obtained a copy.
Noem added that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the U.S. next month.
She says she includes the story about Cricket to show that, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, she is prepared to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” that needs to be done.
Cricket ruined bird hunts, she wrote, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
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On the way home after a hunt, as Noem visited a friend, 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, behaved like “a trained assassin,” she wrote.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote. Cricket was “untrainable,” she wrote, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.” Noem got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
She had to kill a goat.
When her daughter Kennedy got off the bus and didn’t see the dog, she asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson, now with the Lincoln Project, tweeted on X:
“Kristi Noem is trash.
“Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.
“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog. Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable.
“We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch.
“You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit.
“Unsporting and deliberately cruel ... but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”
Denver Riggleman, former GOP Congressman from Virginia, tweeted: “It’s not fun to put down pets and animals. It’s not a test of toughness. It’s mercy. Respect for life. Responsibility as an adult. There are animals that are dangerous and sometimes you have to do things. Bragging about it makes you small and empty.”
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