He killed his dog and a “stinky” goat. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota on Donald Trump’s shortlist of candidates for vice-presidency, says in one of her books that he killed her dog and also a goat. “Cricket was a short-haired pointer about 14 months old,” she writes, explaining that the […]
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He killed his dog and a “stinky” goat. Kristi Noemthe governor of South Dakota shortlisted for the vice presidency Of Donald Trumpin a book he says he had killed his dog and also a little goat. “Cricket was a short-haired pointer approximately 14 months,” he writes, explaining that the dog, a female, had a “aggressive personality” and had to be trained to be used for the pheasant hunting. In the pages of the book Noem recounts the failed training and reveals that the one perpetrated against the puppy dog is not the only killing he has committed.
The book is called No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward (There’s No Going Back: The Truth About What’s Wrong with Politics and How to Move America Forward, ed.) and the anecdotes described serve, as explained by the author herself, to demonstrate that in politics she is willing to do “difficult and ugly things“, if necessary. Like other aspirants to the role of Trump’s second vice president who have tried their hand at writing, he explains the Guardianthe candidate offers readers a mixture of autobiographypolitical ideas and invectives aimed at Democrats and other enemies.
The story about the puppy is detailed: “I hated that dog. He was untrainable and dangerous to anyone who came into contact with him, and was worth less than nothing as a hunting dog. At that moment I realized that I would have to shoot him down,” we read in the book, of which some American media have spread previews. Taking Cricket pheasant hunting with older dogs, the policy explains that he hoped to calm the puppy. Unfortunately, Cricket ruins the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.” The stories about hunting are followed by the reconstruction of some episodes on the alleged impetuosity of the dog (also guilty of having killed some chickens), and then the final decision of the Republican candidate. “It wasn’t pleasant,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after I finished, I realized that it had to be done another unpleasant thing.”
His family, he writes, also owned a male goat who was “ugly and bad” because she had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat had a “disgusting” smellmusky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, causing them to fall and ruining their clothes. The governor then decides to kill the goat in the same way she had just killed the dog. First “drag it into one gravel pit”, but the goat jumps while she shoot, surviving. The woman then goes back to her van and picks up another one cartridge and “runs back to the gravel pit to tear it down.” A scene also glimpsed by the workers engaged in some jobs on the family farm, who seeing what the candidate is willing to do, “scared, quickly returned to work”.
The stories provoked harsh reactions from the animal rights and opposition associations. The governor said her book contains “real, honest and politically incorrect which will leave the media speechless.” Noem also took to social media to defend herself, however revealing other killings: “We love animals, but difficult decisions like this happen all the time on a farm – she wrote on X (formerly Twitter) –. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago we had to take down 3 horses who had been in our family for 25 years.” In the book, however, she herself demonstrates, despite herself, how her political narrative is potentially an own goal: “I think if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.”
