One of Donald Trump’s possible running mates is under fire for telling a narrative in her biography about how she killed her dog.
Kristi Noem, 52, the governor of South Dakota, said in her soon-to-be-published biography that the dog, Cricket, was “untrainable” and “dangerous.”.
After determining that the dog ought to be put down, Ms. Noem escorted her to a gravel pit and shot her.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she explained. “But it had to be done.”
The biography, titled No Going Back: The Truth About What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Can Move America Forward, is set to be released on May 7, but The Guardian has secured an excerpt.
The article was widely condemned online.
According to the Democratic National Committee, “If you want elected officials who don’t brag about brutally killing their pets, vote Democrat.”
Meghan McCain, the daughter of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, stated, “You can recover from a lot of things in politics—changing the narrative, etc.—but not from killing a dog.”
Ms. Noem justified herself in a Twitter/X post, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.”
She promised more “real, honest, and politically incorrect stories” in her future book.
Ms. Noem, who dropped out of college at 22 to run her family farm in South Dakota, wrote in her memoir of attempting to teach Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, how to behave by bringing her on a pheasant hunt with some older dogs.
However, attempts to punish her, including the use of an electric collar, were unsuccessful, she claimed.
On the way home from the hunt, she stopped to chat with a local family when Cricket escaped and attacked their hens, “grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite.”.
After apologizing to the family for the dog’s behavior, she stated that she realized it needed to be put down.
“I hated that dog,” she added.
The experience reminded her that “another unpleasant job needed to be done” that day: getting rid of a male goat her family owned.
The goat was “nasty and mean,” smelled “disgusting, musky, and rancid,” and would pursue her tiny children, knocking them over.
Ms. Noem claimed she shot down the goat in the same manner as Cricket, but the goat survived the initial round, prompting her to return to her truck to fetch another shell.
Her children were promptly dropped off by the school bus.
When her daughter saw that the dog was missing, she inquired, “Hey, where’s Cricket?”.
In the book extract, Ms. Noem stated that she recounted the anecdote to demonstrate her readiness to do things that are “difficult, messy, and ugly” in politics and in life when required.
“I guess if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she went on to say.
Mr. Trump, the probable Republican presidential contender, has intimated that Ms. Noem is among his prospective running mates.
Ms. Noem was her state’s sole member in the House of Representatives for eight years until becoming its first female governor in 2018.
