Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who admitted to hating the animal, seems to care more about boosting book sales.
Zany: Can I get a collective WTF?! I grew up in the country, but it wasn’t on a farm or in South Dakota, so maybe this is a “normal” thing to do in rural areas of that state? I have no idea. However, as someone who worked in veterinary medicine her entire career, I don’t like it! Especially when puppies can be retrained and rehomed. Petfinder.org? In this particular situation, a dog at 14 months old (especially this breed) was not displaying bad behavior—just the behavior of… a dog.
Anytime you grab a dog in a situation like that it’s going to bite first and then look to see who it’s biting later. That’s why you should never try and break up a dogfight. Even if your “best friend” is involved.
Even stranger to me is the ease and comfortability she displayed in telling the story. It’s just so odd! Mother Jones has more on this weird story about Kristi Noem freely admitting that she killed her own puppy.
Here at Mother Jones, we respect a wide spectrum of views when it comes to dogs. But a line must be drawn somewhere, and that somewhere is revealing that you killed your 14-month-old wirehair pointer for acting like a puppy.
That’s what South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem admitted to in graphic detail in her forthcoming book, which was obtained by the Guardian and has since sparked outrage even in Republican circles. But if your instinct is to give Noem the benefit of the doubt, which I initially did upon hearing about this story, I am here to tell you that her actions are far worse than I could have imagined.
In the passages obtained by the Guardian, Noem details a hunt gone wrong because the dog, Cricket, was “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.” (To me, that behavior seems wholly appropriate for a puppy, especially when outdoors.) But things take a decidedly awful turn when Cricket attacks chickens belonging to a local family. From the Guardian:
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin.”
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me.” Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.”
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy.”
