South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) has made a significant admission in her upcoming memoir, a revelation that, as The Guardian notes, has never surfaced until now.
Noem explains in detail how a rambunctious young dog named Cricket proved herself unworthy, untrainable and potentially volatile, leading her to take the “hated” pup aside, place her in a gravel pit and shoot her.
Barack Obama admitted in his book “Dreams From My Father” to eating dog meat as a child in Indonesia. Ironically, the former president’s 2012 reelection campaign pilloried Republican nominee Mitt Romney for making his family dog ride in a cart on the roof of their car during road trips. (RELATED: Florida Seeks To Ban Dogs From A Favorite Activity)
Still, even Noem admits that “a better politician … wouldn’t tell the story here.”
The governor writes, “Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old.” Describing her personality as “aggressive,” Noem wanted to train her for pheasant hunting.
Noem uses the story, detailed over several pages, to supposedly depict her willingness to confront life’s “difficult, messy and ugly” situations.
Taking Cricket out with older, more mature dogs, she hoped to calm the dog naturally. But Cricket went “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.”
At that point, she compares the late dog to 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.”
Despite the chaos, Noem wrote that Cricket continued to display “pure joy.” (RELATED: Fox News Host Jesse Watters Injured In Hand And Groin)
“I hated that dog,” she added, describing Cricket as “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“I realized I had to put her down.”
“It was not a pleasant job,” she added “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Noem explains that Cricket was not the only problematic animal owned by her family. She used the opportunity to dispose of a “nasty and mean” uncastrated male goat who “loved to chase” to Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes. The governor describes taking the “disgusting, musky, rancid” animal to the same pit that she shot Cricket in.
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.”
The governor describes how startled construction workers watched her as the incident unfolded. Then, her daughter, Kennedy, appeared, with one question on her mind: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
“We love animals,” Noem posted to X in response to the article, “but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”
The governor proceeded to encourage her supporters to preorder the $30 book for “more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping.”
Noem’s book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” will be available next month.
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Patrick Houck is an avid political enthusiast based out of the Washington, D.C., metro area. His expertise is in campaigns and the use of targeted messaging to persuade voters. When not combing through the latest news, you can find him enjoying the company of family and friends or pursuing his love of photography.
