A top contender for Donald Trump’s vice president (VP), South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, has been caught in the crosshairs of controversy after a passage from her forthcoming memoir revealing that she shot her dog leaked to the press.
In No Going Back: The Truth of What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, set to come out May 7th, Noem (52) shares a story about how her dog Cricket was posing problems due to being “untrainable” and “dangerous.” She concluded that she had to be put down, so she took her to a gravel pit and fired a gun. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote. “But it had to be done.” An advance copy was obtained by British news outlet The Guardian.
The story was immediately taken up by uncharitable critics on social media. “If you want elected officials who don’t brag about brutally killing their pets… vote Democrat,” wrote the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
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Meghan McCain, talk show host and daughter of the late Senator John McCain, wrote, “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc – but not from killing a dog.”
In defense of her story, Noem took to X, writing, “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.””
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
In her book, Noem reportedly discusses dropping out of college at age 22 to run her family farm. In that context, she writes about her attempts to train Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, to get along with older dogs while on a pheasant hunt. But all her attempts to control her, including with an electric collar, were of no avail.
On the way back home, Cricket escaped from her side and attacked the chickens of a local family, “grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite.” When Noem tried to stop the dog, she “whipped around to bite” her, looking like “the picture of pure joy” in her bloodlust.
It was then that she decided it needed to be put down. “I hated that dog,” she said. That day, she also decided a second “unpleasant job” had to be done: getting rid of the “nasty and mean” male goat owned by the family, who smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid,” and would attack small children. She shot the goat in the same way she shot cricket, but the first shot didn’t kill him, forcing her to go back to her truck and get a second shell.
Then her children came home, looking for their dog. “Hey, where’s Cricket?” her daughter asked.
Using these stories, Noem underscored how she has experience doing “difficult, messy and ugly” things, and how it prepared her to do them in politics and life. “I guess if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she wrote.
Trump has reportedly said Noem is a solid running mate choice in the past, fulfilling his wish to have a female VP. Noem served as South Dakota’s only member of the US House of Representatives for eight years until she ran for governor in 2018.
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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