South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is widely considered to be on Donald Trump’s shortlist as his 2024 running mate, but a new book Noem has written may have put the kibosh on her chances of ever being anything more than a GOP footnote.
The book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Newsweek reports, features a section in which Noem admits she executed the family’s puppy, Cricket, because the dog didn’t obey her commands.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem reportedly wrote, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
She wrote that she took Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs to calm the animal and help it learn how to behave. But on the hunt, Cricket went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
Noem said she tried to control Cricket by using an electronic collar, but the dog didn’t respond to the training, so she gunned it down in cold blood.
Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” This made the chickens’ owner cry and Noem financially renumerated them and helped them clean the mess the dog had made.
“At that moment,” Noem said, “I realized I had to put her down.”
Noem even gives a blow by blow description of how she killed the helpless animal.
The excerpt from Noem’s book set off a wave of anger and revulsion on social media, where she was excoriated as “an utterly callous and despicable woman.”
