Kristi Noem is South Dakota’s Republican governor. When she first ran for governor in 2018, she was endorsed by Donald Trump. She’s full MAGA and, reportedly, she’s on Trump’s shortlist for his running mate. She used her position as governor to kill off South Dakotans by protesting all masking requirements during the pandemic. She’s 52 years old and married, but there were widespread rumors last year that she was or is banging Corey Lewandowski, who is a Trumper piece of sh-t. All of this should give you an accurate portrait of just who Governor Noem is and how she operates. A lot of people already despised her, but now pretty much every American is ready to destroy her. Noem has released a memoir and one of the biggest stories in it is Noem’s narrative about how she killed family’s puppy, Cricket.
Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant. What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.
Noem includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done. By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”. Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”. Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog. At that moment. I realised I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished. Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes. Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.
At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.
“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
At no point does Noem think “hey, maybe this dog is too young to be trained for hunting” or “maybe Cricket can be more of a family pet than some kind of super-trained hunting dog.” Or even: maybe this young dog isn’t a good fit with the Noem family but Cricket will make a good pet to some other family. The puppy was only 14 months old!! Noem literally murdered a dog because SHE couldn’t be bothered to train Cricket properly. The part where Cricket is just a happy dog, racing around and having fun… it makes me feel sick. That poor dog.
Please join me in wishing Cricket (the dog Kristi Noem shot to death) a blessed journey to the land of beautiful puppy dog souls. pic.twitter.com/VxBxP1BZgF
— Lakota Man (@LakotaMan1) April 26, 2024
Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit. https://t.co/X5W61xGISd pic.twitter.com/qFQ63FTBQU
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) April 27, 2024
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.