South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem admitted to killing her dog in a new memoir. By confessing, she may also have killed her chance at national office.
Backlash has been fierce to the revelations in her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. Noem is among those rumored to be in contention for Donald Trump’s Vice President pick in the 2024 election.
After obtaining a copy of the book ahead of its publication next month, the UK’s Guardian reported that Noem wrote about the time she shot dead Cricket, a 14-month-old dog she intended to train for hunting pheasant.
Noem said she took the action after the dog ruined a hunt, killed another family’s chickens, and moved to bite her.
Noem said Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and was “untrainable,” per the Guardian’s report. Noem wrote that she took Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs as a learning tool for the dog. But Cricket went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
She said she called Cricket, then used an electronic collar to try to control the dog. On the way home, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and killed the chickens of a local family, who Noem compensated. The dog then “whipped around to bite me,” the politician wrote.
Noem said, “I realized I had to put her down.” She led Cricket to a gravel pit and shot and killed the dog.
The book details more animal victims. Noem also killed a male goat that she said was “nasty and mean,” smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid,” and “loved to chase” her children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes. She also killed the goat in the gravel pit, although it reportedly took two shots.
Noem wrote that she confessed to the killings to show that in politics and life, she was willing to do what was “difficult, messy, and ugly” if it was necessary.
Noem responded to the outraged backlash on Friday in a post on X: “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,” she concluded, with a link to her book.
