The governor of South Dakota recounts in her memoirs how she killed her dog and a goat, triggering the anger of animal-loving political figures.
An original campaign argument. To demonstrate her determination to secure the position of vice president for Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, recounted how she killed her dog, Cricket. The politician returned to this episode in her soberly titled memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward (No Turning Back: The Truth About What’s Wrong in Politics and How We Move America Forward, in French), which will be published on May 7, and revealed exclusively by the Guardian .
The Republican admitted to having killed Cricket, a female wirehaired pointer, aged only 14 months, and justified her action because of the “aggressive personality” of the animal, quotes the British newspaper. The dog was simply poorly behaved. To remedy this, Kristi Noem decided to take him pheasant hunting with older dogs. But Cricket had decided otherwise and suddenly showed up “crazy with excitement, chasing away all the birds”.
“It needs to be done”
The politician explains that she used an electric collar to try to control her dog, in vain. Cricket even ran away from his truck to attack a neighboring family’s chickens. “She would grab one chicken at a time, crunching it to death in one bite, then drop it to attack another”, she explains. Kristi Noem then compares her animal to a “assassin” who then started biting her.
It was too much. After apologizing and presenting a check to the grieving family, the Republican candidate led Cricket into a gravel pit, grabbed his gun and killed his dog. “It was not a pleasant jobshe writes, but it had to be done. And once it was over, I realized I had to do another unpleasant job.” She describes this unfortunate episode as something “difficult, messy and ugly”, but that it had to be done. Certainly a way for her to illustrate that she is ready to get her hands dirty to achieve her goals.
But Kristi Noem, a serious candidate for the position of Donald Trump’s running mate, did not stop at this anecdote. Still in her memoirs, which mix autobiographical stories and attacks on Democrats, the politician mentions the case of a goat “wicked”. In addition to having a smell “disgusting and rancid”he loved “hunt” his children by knocking them over. Once again, Kristi Noem decided to kill the animal. And she tells how the beast escaped the bullet for the first time, before finally killing it.
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“Lazy Girl”
These two stories quickly offended political figures, animal lovers, who reacted on social networks. Rick Wilson, a Republican founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, called Kristi Noem a “deliberately cruel”. “She killed a puppy because she was lazy training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog”he denounced on X.
Ryan Busse, the Democratic candidate for governor of Montana, said that “Anyone who has ever owned a hound dog knows how disgusting, lazy and evil it is. Cursed be he. Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for Barack Obama, even compared Kristi Noem to Jeffrey Dahmer, an American serial killer nicknamed “The Milwaukee Cannibal” and which was the subject of a series.
Faced with the reactions, Kristi Noem spoke up to defend herself by publishing on Guardian. In her post, she added that she also had to “kill three horses” who were in the family “since 25 years”while maintaining “love animals”. “But decisions like this happen all the time on a farm”she justified herself.
In her memoir, Kristi Noem compares the story of Cricket and the Goat as “the biggest understatement of the election year”. And to continue: “I think if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t be telling this story here.”
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Before Kristi Noem, other American candidates had already been the target of criticism for acts of animal abuse. In 1952, Richard Nixon, then the Republican vice-presidential candidate, sparked controversy after receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift. In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car during a cross-country trip.
