Kristi Noem is one of the contenders for the role of vice president if Donald Trump wins the next elections in the United States. The current governor of South Dakota, however, has a characteristic that distinguishes her from her competitors: having killed her dog and admitted it in her latest book, obtained as a preview by the editorial staff of Guardian: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, scheduled for release next month. Noem offers readers a mix of autobiography, political visions and invectives aimed at Democrats, while describing herself as a politician who, when necessary, knows how to navigate “difficult, ugly and chaotic” situations, exactly, says the 52-year-old, like killing your dog . Noem describes the 14-month-old puppy as an unruly and difficult to control animal.
«A dog impossible to train»
One day, the Republican politician decided to try to calm Cricket down by taking her and other expert dogs on a pheasant hunting trip. But – she writes in her book Noem – Cricket had other plans. When the time came to identify the birds, the dog went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having fun like crazy”. Noem says she called and called Cricket back, even using an electronic collar to try to keep her under control. But nothing to do. Shortly thereafter, on the way back from the hunting trip, while Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket ran away from the pick-up of Noem and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabbing one chicken at a time, chewing it to death and then dropping it to move on to the next.” Cricket, the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained killer.”
The killer
Noem says she managed, with quite a bit of effort, to catch Cricket, who in response “turned around suddenly to bite me”. Meanwhile, the owner of the chickens was crying. The governor of South Dakota explains that she apologized repeatedly, both verbally and with a check, and then helped the family “dispose of the carcasses that cluttered the crime scene.” While all this was happening, according to Noem, Cricket was bursting with joy. “I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proven “impossible to train,” “dangerous to anyone who came in contact with her,” and “less than useless… as a hunting dog.” «In that moment», Noem writes again, «I understood that I had to put her down». So Noem took her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It wasn’t a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.” And from the pages of the book we learn that Cricket is not the only animal killed just for being considered too annoying: the same fate also befell a “dirty and smelly” goat
