Posted on 04/27/2024 10:09:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I have been an admirer of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem ever since she first showed up on my radar after her election in 2019. She has established a solid record as a conservative with ambitious policy goals that have served her state very well and she's an excellent communicator. She's been well up on my list of potential Trump veepstakes picks because she brings a lot to the table. But all of that came crashing down for me yesterday evening when The Guardian published a review of her upcoming book, "No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward." It sounds as if most of the book is a fairly typical political analysis of the dangers of rampant progressivism and the need to restore traditional American values. But it also contains one highly disturbing episode from her life when she killed one of her own dogs, a German wirehaired pointer named Cricket who was only 14 months old. Her description of the incident is rather horrifying and I fear it speaks poorly of her character. (Warning: Potentially disturbing content ahead.)
In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.
But in 2024 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 describes attempting to train Cricket to hunt pheasant and the dog's failure to adapt to typical hunting procedures. Rather than locating game and "pointing" (hence the breed name) at birds so the hunter can take them, Cricket would "go out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”. It sounds as if Cricket wasn't well-suited to be a hunting dog, but was certainly very happy. Noem even described Cricket as "the picture of pure joy."
Despite all of that, she took the dog out to a gravel pit and shot her with a rifle. She later returned and did the same to a goat. She reports that the uncastrated goat was "nasty and mean." Having worked summer jobs on family farms growing up, I can assure you that uncastrated male goats kept for breeding are aggressive and territorial. It's just their nature.
In a way, I suppose I can understand why Noem would choose to share this story. She's trying to make the point that she is "willing to do anything, difficult, messy, and ugly if it simply needs to be done." That can be true at times in politics to be sure, but as a leader, character also counts for a lot. As I've written here before, my wife and I first met volunteering at an animal shelter. Dogs mean a lot to us and we've had many over the decades we've been together. If you have a dog that you're raising for hunting and it doesn't work out, you can find a new home for the dog, particularly when it is so young and "the picture of pure joy."
Even if you can't manage to find a new home yourself, you could take the dog to a shelter. If all else fails, you might feel you have no other choice, but you should euthanize the dog humanely. We've had to take too many of our dogs to be put to sleep but they were all suffering from extreme old age and/or painful, untreatable diseases. (We probably could have paid off our house five years earlier with all the money we've spent on veterinary bills.) If the Noem family was operating a farm, they obviously knew and had access to a veterinarian. It's a requirement for such an operation. You don't just drag the dog to a gravel pit and shoot it.
In the book, Noem writes, “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” The Guardian correctly describes that passage as possibly being "the greatest understatement of election year." I agree. I wish I hadn't learned this about her.
To be clear, this doesn't take away from Noem's commendable performance as the Governor of South Dakota. And if Donald Trump does wind up picking her to be his running mate, I won't hold it against him or fail to vote for him. (We vote for presidents, not vice presidents.) But if she were to move forward and run for national office on her own, I would be forced to find a third-party candidate to vote for. As I said above, character is also important in leaders. I could not, in good conscience, vote for Kristi Noem. That's how important this is to me.
There are no shelters in the country. There's no tax base or donations for that sort of thing. There's a shelter two counties over but they only take animals from people who live in that county.
There's a few small cities around here and when some renter can no longer have a dog or poor people can no longer afford to feed them, they drop them off out here in rural land. They'll either get taken in or shot.
No way! Carson is a beta compared to Noem who is strong and brave. Carson would be afraid to bait a hook or shoot a Red Ryder BB gun. He has zero governing skills.
Total rubbish. I like her even more now. Also a 14 month old dog is not a puppy.
” Farm folk don’t pay vets to euthanize animals. “
Yes. This whole story is nonsense, and just shows that too many people in North America are too many generations off the farm.
Stupidized by liberalism and sentimentalism, from living in concrete towers and mostly seeing animals on TV or social media.
When I was a little kid, Grandfather’s old dog bit my younger brother in the face.
When we went into town that afternoon, “Major” disappeared, never to be seen again. Shot and buried, and that was it.
” So go ahead and vote for Biden. He likes dangerous dogs the same as you do. “
LOL !
that’s my impression as well.
Speaker Johnson energy.
Pretty much come on.
It’s writing about and telling the world about it that’s so stupid.
(shiver)
She doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”
Correct.
And I don’t owe her my vote.
NoLibZone: good comeback. You win the best post of the day.
Used to they didn’t pay to have the spayed or neutered either. They just got rid of the litter (cats and dogs)
The sequel to Old Yeller: Young Feller,with Noem in the role of Miss Gulch.
“putting it down might have been justified but to do it yourself with a gun is a bit radical.”
“Any hardscrabble old farmer knows you don’t want to waste ammunition on a dog so you take them over to the horse trough for a drowning. At the very least #4 buck at close range. But taking pot shots with a rifle or a pistol is a gamble and prone to a messy wounding.”
I’ve read some people think that she should have dropped it off at a animal shelter.
We have an SPCA in town and it’s full of pitbulls probably 99%, at some point at of saturation I can understand a mass execution of this breed that clogs up the system that was set up to treat animals humanely... and now has become exclusive club for dogs initually bred to kill, and one that very few desire to own.
In the world of dog shows and breeding Hunters there is a selection process and there is also a deselection process, many people don’t realize how many dogs that are selectively bred are put down because he didn’t quite meet the requirements.
The breeder rationalizes it as not wanting to delute the breed or staining the quality if their product line and as having a responsibility to put out the best possible animal representative of that breed that they labor so hard for.. that’s a psychology behind putting down specialized animals that aren’t quite up to standard.
Guard dogs, protective dogs, K9’s don’t go out on market after they flunked out of training. Military Veterinarians take care of the washouts, but not at the rifle range. And also when Dog Handlers reach the end their obligated service their dogs are also put down.
Noem doesn’t really do much for me, she’s on the radar. But she seems to be doing a fine job for South Dakota and like the Desantis, she should probably stay in the state that she’s doing such a fine job of running.
I rented a cottage on a farm for several years.
The farmer’s daughter (hey - knock it off - she was 13 or something!) told me she always thought they only had one baby each time. It wasn’t until she was older that she found out her dad would keep one and put the rest in a sack with a rock and into the pond.
I couldn’t do that - but I get it.
“It’s writing about and telling the world about it that’s so stupid.”
Wasn’t it Gary Hart that dared the media to catch him cheating on his wife? And then they caught him? I thought the same thing - him cheating on his wife wasn’t a big deal to me (I was young and my morals weren’t what they should have been), but getting caught was stupid and didn’t reflect well on his ability to make good decisions.
OTOH - perhaps Noem wanted this to come out on her own accord, rather than the media finding out about it?
Exactly. It’s not that she put the dog down, or even if it was right thing to do, it’s that she was dumb enough to write about it, and seemingly not realizing how bad that was coming to come across to many, let alone what the national media would do with it should she become the VP candidate.
A true sportsman doesn't want the dog used for breeding purposes by some unscrupulous breeder, there+by adding poor traits to the breed.
and a billy goat that is mean could hurt someone if it got out. and you can eat it.
its not like she killed a family pet. it was a dog that wouldnt hunt. and a goat that was a menace.
While I think Sarah Huckabee Sanders would make the best VP to handle the press, I think Glen Youngkin would make the overall best VP.
He is an experienced venture capital and private equity investor and current Governor of a purple state, Virginia.
If Trump wins Virginia, he has the election sewn up.
I think Trump will take the risk that Youngkin ***might*** carry Virginia.
I agree. Pretty stupid to think people would rally behind that. I think maybe it could be that crazy hot matrix thing, or she just wants to go back to private sector.
We do put down dogs that are aggressive but being a public official and putting that into words for eternity wasn’t a wise move.
Animal shelters murder millions of shelter animals a year.
There’s nothing wrong with putting your animal down. All sorts of city people pay a vet to do the nasty for them, when the pet is violent or old.
Putting down your own animal is taking personal responsibility for your situation.
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