«I hated that dog, he was worth less than nothing as a hunting dog. I understood that I would have to kill her.”
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota and potential candidate for vice president of the United States (she is on Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential names), talks about killing her dog Cricket (and a goat) in her book «No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” But those episodes – which she included in her autobiography, not yet published, to demonstrate how willing she is to do “difficult, confusing and ugly things”, if necessary – have inexorably triggered political controversy.
In her story, Noem goes into detail about Cricket’s killing: still young – at the time of his death – but according to the governor evidently “untrainable”.
«She was dangerous for anyone who came into contact with her, she was worth less than nothing as a hunting dog, she behaved like a killer» (she had attacked the neighbours’ chickens). “At that moment I realized that I would have to” put her down.
The Democratic Party defined the extracts already made public from the book
calling them “horrific” and “disturbing”.
Noem responded on X, saying she loves animals, but “difficult decisions like this happen on a farm all the time. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago we had to put down three horses.”
