What in the David Eason nonsense is this?!
If you aren’t from South Dakota you may not even know who Kristi Noem is! But the governor has a decent chance of being our next Vice President since she’s apparently a frontrunner on Donald Trump‘s running mate shortlist!
So listen up!
In her upcoming book, Noem tells a story we expect she thought would make her look like a tough, no-nonsense country gal capable of making hard choices. Instead, she comes across to us as an incompetent psychopath dog murderer!
The memoir/political screed is set for release next month, but The Guardian got a copy for review and just had to share this terrible tale early! Noem explains she was training a “puppy” to be a hunting dog. Cricket, she writes, was “a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old” whom she’d been trying to teach to hunt using a shock collar. Apparently she was a crap trainer because she took the pup on her first hunt, and instead of following her directions she just ran after the pheasants. Cricket was “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” Noem recalls — but was “less than worthless as a hunting dog.” Noem called the pup “untrainable” due to her “aggressive personality.” She would not get a second chance at hunting, nor would she be given an opportunity to just go be a dog somewhere.
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Noem writes that on the way home from the failed hunt, she stopped to see a family who happened to raise chickens. She let Cricket out, and the dog apparently didn’t know the difference between pheasants and chickens — because she sort of did as she was trained. She attacked, grabbing “one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” Noem says she tried to grab to dog to stop it, but it “whipped around to bite me.” Notably, she doesn’t say the dog bit her but that it acted as if it would. A pretty big distinction, and one we’ve pointed out before in a story of a creep who killed a dog.
The governor says she apologized to the horrified chickens’ owners, wrote them a check to cover the losses, “and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.” Cricket, meanwhile, never understood she was doing anything wrong — and was “the picture of pure joy.” Again, doesn’t sound like a foaming-at-the-mouth attacker of its owner, does it? Nevertheless, Noem says she decided right then and there to put down the dog.
Noem says she brought the pup right to a gravel pit she knew and shot it dead.
She tries to makes it sound like a mercy killing, like she’s taking Old Yeller behind the barn, but there are just too many parts of the story with red flags. Like, she writes:
“I hated that dog.”
That’s an emotional response! That’s not euthanasia, not mercy, not making the hard choice — that sounds like she made the choice she always wanted to make from the moment she faced any adversity in trying to train it. This doesn’t sound like the tough, right choice. It sounds like she failed to train a puppy — and took her failure out on the animal! We mean, she didn’t have to kill it herself, right? Again, she’s trying to display her willingness to do whatever needs to be done, no matter how “difficult, messy and ugly.” Those are her words. But these are her own words that make it sound like she’s reveling in it! Remember, this isn’t some hit job, this is her own book, in which she writes that slaughtering one animal made her decide she may has well get another one! She says:
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
That job was killing a goat the family had on their property. What, was slaughtering an animal like popping a Pringle for this woman??
She says the goat was “nasty and mean” because it hadn’t been castrated. Noem explains the goat “loved to chase” her children around and knock them down. Once again, trying to justify here, but… she also describes the goat as “disgusting, musky, rancid.” She inadvertently once again shows her feelings toward the animal were involved.
This killing didn’t go as well as the puppy. She writes that the goat dodged, and she missed — only horribly wounding the animal. Once again, she comes across as incompetent here, causing this beast far more suffering than was necessary. She only had one shotgun shell left after the puppy, we guess? Because she says she then ran back to the truck for another shell then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
Shockingly, this isn’t even the end of the story…
Noem says only afterward did she notice (when the red mist cleared we guess?) a construction crew had just watched this double header animal execution. She recalls how they averted their eyes and went back to work. Again, aiming for “even tougher than these manly men” and landing more in the ballpark of “terrifying to all the normal people.”
Just then, South Dakota’s first female governor writes, the school bus arrived, bringing her children home.
Let’s get this straight… this “gravel pit” wasn’t in the middle of nowhere… it was in plain view of men working on her property… and also very nearby the dropoff point for her school-aged children..? That’s the spot she picked for her afternoon bloodbath!?!?
Noem writes that her daughter Kennedy asked, “looked around confused,” and asked:
“Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Wow. This and other tales can apparently be found in No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. Does anyone think the thing wrong with politics is not enough Shia LaBeoufs running around killing dogs?? Well, Trump might. He actually hates dogs. True story.
Obviously animal lovers — including many of her fellow Republicans AND some owners of wirehaired pointer hunting dogs — were disgusted by these statements. PETA called Noem “a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out.” See a few more reactions to the horrifying story (below):
[Image via MEGA/WENN.]