Kristi Noem Tries To Make Story Better By Insisting She Didn't Kill A 'Puppy'... Just A Very Young Dog...

Well, she’s still trying. The question is… are even Republicans out there buying this crap??

It’s looking more and more likely by the day Kristi Noem will go down in history not as a footnote Vice Presidential contender but instead for one of the biggest own goals in the history of US politics. An excerpt surfaced a few days ago from the South Dakota governor’s memoir, No Going Back: The blahblahblah, in which she wrote about how she killed her puppy. Yes, really. If you haven’t heard the story…

In short, she tried to train poor 14-month-old Cricket to help her hunt but found it difficult. She was just too rambunctious and playful for the governor’s skills — as Noem put it, she “hated that dog.” Charming. But then Noem made the mistake of taking the pup to a nearby chicken farm, and naturally all hell broke loose. Cricket did what puppies trained to go bite birds did and ran around chomping as many chickens as it could. Noem says she made the difficult decision to immediately execute the puppy herself. You know, to show she’s a strong, no-nonsense politician. She added that while she was at it — “it” being the slaughter of animals she didn’t like — she decided to go grab a stinky goat that was annoying her and shoot it, too. (Anything to make the red mist clear away, we guess? We don’t know, we never understood that logic.) Anyway, that’s when, she writes, her daughter was dropped off by the schoolbus and asked:

“Hey, where’s cricket?”

At first she doubled down, though we noticed she did tweak the story a bit, painting Cricket as having bitten a bunch of people, too — something you’d think she would have mentioned in the first place.

And she’s keeping that same strategy going. She’s making it look like she’s standing firm… while also scrambling to reframe the story with different details until people think she was justified.

Take her interview with Sean Hannity from Wednesday night. OK, so once again we’re talking about the story she told in her own book. But as she’s seeing the political fallout, she’s still going to the Donald Trump playbook and declaring everything is “fake news.” LOLz! It’s kind of remarkable to watch, tbh. Or at least it would be, if Fox News had the guts to put her interview online! LOLz! Apparently they didn’t think it went very well either, because we can’t find the damn thing anywhere! But here’s the lowlights…

“Well, Sean, you know how the fake news works. They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it, and that’s what happened in this case.”

Ha! We haven’t seen anything about this story we could even call “spin.” The woman said she shot a pointer puppy in the head, one she “hated” and was angry with. No one was in danger, she could have brought the dog to a family or shelter that could give it the patience it needed. She killed it instead. It’s not spin, it’s the natural reaction all the sane people have to this nonsense story.

So seriously, WTF does Kristi say is a “lie” by the lamestream media, considering she wrote the damn story herself? She says:

“The truth of this story is that this was a working dog, and it was not a puppy.”

A “working dog.” Uh huh. Not that we don’t still think it would be shocking and sadistic to personally kill a fully grown dog, but let’s examine that claim. She gave the age of the dog in her own book! 14 months. A wirehair pointer ages from a puppy to a full-grown dog somewhere between one and two years. So statistically this IS a puppy. Obviously, it could have been a very young full-sized dog. But a hunting dog expert from Noem’s own state of South Dakota has said a dog won’t fully mature until 2 years old and won’t be a good hunting dog until 3-4 years. So calling it a “working dog” is a hell of a stretch.

Also, like humans, growing to adulthood isn’t an overnight process. Even a dog that’s reached full size hasn’t necessarily reached full maturity. And this one clearly hadn’t, just by the governor’s own description! This sounds like a puppy to every dog owner who reads the story!

Next, Noem paints a new portrait of little Cricket — as a bloodthirsty monster!

“It was a dog that was extremely dangerous; it had come to us from a family who had found her way too aggressive. We were her second chance. And the day she was put down was the day she massacred livestock that were part of our neighbors’… She attacked me. And it was a hard decision.”

Love how she keeps saying “livestock” to make it sound like Cricket was a chupacabra. It killed a handful of chickens. Who’s spinning now, Kristi? BTW, every dog owner we’ve asked agrees an owner who let a dog she knew to be untrained loose around a bunch of chickens only has herself to blame! As for the “attacked me” line? Noem did not say she ever got bit in her original story. She said the dog turned as if to bite her. That’s hardly an attack.

Finally she went with the whole argument that from the moment the dog had tasted blood, it was too late:

“Farmers and ranchers, they expect it. They know that once an animal like this starts killing, and starts killing just because they enjoy it, that is a very dangerous animal.”

Serious question: if this dog was being trained to hunt, to run after small birds… How was it not doing a version of the thing it was being trained to do? We all agree the dog was not trained well, that fact isn’t in dispute. Noem mentioned she tried a shock collar, she didn’t go into much more detail. Though it doesn’t sound like she had the dog too long if her family was its second home.

Frankly, it still kind of just sounds in her original story like she just got fed up — very quickly — with trying to train a dog that wasn’t easy. She wrote that she “hated” Cricket. Pretending she’s the kid at the end of Old Yeller now, making a “hard decision,” well… we don’t think anyone is buying into any of these modified versions of the story. Or, as they say on the ranch… that dog won’t hunt.

You can see Noem try to defend herself thanks to a local Dakota news network covering it (below):