To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.
And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’
“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.
“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.
I know that country folk regard dogs as working animals and deride the way the city mice anthropomorphize them and lavish love and attention on them. Did anyone bother to tell Noem that there are an awful lot of those city slickers outside of the Dakotas? If she’s smart enough to be President, you know, unlike Joe or Kamala, one would think she could figure that one out, but apparently not. Shooting a dog that is a little more than a year old and that has never been properly trained, however, isn’t even acceptability conduct for flyover country. “I hated that dog,”the Governor writes. I guarantee that Cricket didn’t hate her, but now several million Americans do, and she deserves it.
Noem also reveals that she shot an annoying annoying pet goat. “How We Move America Forward,” eh, Kristi? Just find the people responsible for screwing things up, take ’em to the gravel pit, and shoot them!
Amazingly, nobody has informed Noem that the point of campaign biographies is to make a politician more popular, not less. I’d assume anyone who has spent several terms in Congress and managed to get elected to a state house could figure that one out on her own too, but again, not Kristi. Predictably, dog-lovers…heck, non-sadistic fools…pounced. Mark Hamill, posted a picture with his two dogs and said: “Despising animal cruelty should be bipartisan.” Tennis legend Martina Navratilova tweeted, “You are so full of shit it’s not even funny. You just couldn’t be bothered to train that puppy. And if [s]he truly couldn’t be a birddog, I am quite sure [s]he would have been a great pet for a family that didn’t need to shoot birds to give [her] something to do.” Dan Lussen, a hunting dog trainer, was engaged by Rolling Stone to expound that a 14-month-old dog was a “baby that doesn’t know any better,”and that misbehaving dogs are the result of a lack of guidance, training or discipline by the owner. Rachel Bade, a senior Washington correspondent for Politico, “X”ed, “Not sure who advised Kristi Noem that it was a good idea to boast about killing her 14-month-old puppy but I’m willing to bet this would be a big problem for her if she [was] chosen for VP. Makes [2012 presidential nominee Mitt] Romney’s dog-on-the-car-roof story look quaint.” Conservative pundit Meghan McCain, tweeted, “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc. But not from killing a dog. All I will distinctly think about Kristi Noem now is that she murdered a puppy who was ‘acting up’ – which is obviously cruel and insane. Good luck with that VP pick lady. ”
Of course Biden’s campaign, tweeted pictures of Joe and Kamala with non-dead dogs, though given Biden’s negligent handling of his won dog, banished to an a gulag somewhere (Has anyone seen Commander lately?), this comes perilously close to throwing rocks from inside a glass house. The Democratic National Committee chimed in, calling the Cricket story “truly disturbing and horrifying,” and concluding, “Our message is plain and simple. If you want elected officials who don’t brag about brutally killing their pets as part of their self-promotional book tour, then listen to our owners – and vote Democrat.”
Yes, and PETA had to weigh in as well. “Most Americans love their dogs, and we suspect that they will consider Governor Noem a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home,” the usually wacko pro-animal activists said in their most rational statement in memory. “Governor Noem obviously fails to understand the vital political concepts of education, cooperation, compromise and compassion.”
Can’t argue with that! But Noem also has never been told that when she is in a hole, stop digging, so her response to all of this was to grab a metaphorical shovel. Pledging to provide “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,” she babbled, “We love animals…but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” Everybody does it! Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”
Oooo, good rebuttal, Governor!
You’re an idiot.
_______________
Pointer: valkygrrl.
Ethics Alarms 
I guess as one could say of the notion she should be Trump’s VP, “That dog won’t hunt.”
Peta has to walk a fine line here.
With so many animals in need of homes, there is no chance that we will “run out” of animal companions in our lifetimes. But PETA believes that it would be in animals’ best interests if they were no longer bred to be dependent on humans.
https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/pets/
Did they have to struggle with whether Cricket was better off dead than being a slave. Probably not. They saw it was a choice between a dead dog and a Republican politician and picked the position most politically expedient.
-Jut
I was gonna vote for her because she’s pretty. Not anymore!
I’m pretty sure that’s the same reason Trump was going to select her. He only seems to hire and associate with standard issue attractive younger women.
Jeez, I agree with Hamill. This should be non-partisan. Where are the republicans calling her out?
Well, McCain is a Republican, just a Trump-Deranged one.
Trump should call her out.
I guess the larger context is the claim the dog escaped and killed a bunch of the neighbor’s chickens, and then tried to bite Noem when she tried to restrain her. If the dog was resisting training, was out of control, and was developing a history of attack non-game birds and people, then putting the dog down may have been justifiable. However, that doesn’t mean you broadcast it to the world…
I have to agree at least somewhat. It sounds like Cricket was on her way to becoming a problem and a potential liability. This isn’t the first true story of putting an aggressive dog down that I have heard. Someone I once new had to put a malamute named Luna down because she bit her and her partner several times and attacked other people and dogs. She wasn’t rabid, but she just couldn’t give up this behavior.
From the article it also sounds like the goat was violent towards her children and it was only going to be a matter of time before something really bad happened.
My family once had a cat named Arthur who we all loved, but initially he had a real problem with biting and scratching (he was a stray, so he sometimes acted like a street thug), and if we hadn’t been able to train that out of him, I shudder to think what we would have had to do. Eventually he did get put down at about the age of 15, but that was because he had cancer and was going to die in pain, poor kitty.
That said, these are things that it makes little political sense to broadcast to a world of second guessers and people who won’t see it the same way, and that lack of political sense is probably a disqualifier.
Grace and I had to reluctantly put down a young Basset Hound that attacked me, Grace and, the final straw, Grant, but the dog was not aggressive. Apparently some Bassets have a glitch that makes them go into some kind of fugue state in which they don’t recognize their own humans and panic. You could see it: his eyes rolled back in his head. The whole episode was heartbreaking. But the Cricket saga doesn’t sound like that, though we’re relying on The Guardian. A young dog was placed in a strange and new situation and didn’t handle it well—so you shoot her? German wire-haired pointers are notoriously high energy dogs that take a lot of training: the one in our neighborhood, Birdy, was a delightful, loving dog but the family resorted to sending her to a special trainer out of state for a month. (When she returned, the mother in the family accidentally ran over Birdy in her car, killing her.) The chickens? Our first Jack Russell, Dickens, would have gone nuts in a chicken coop: he used to leap into bushes and get stuck trying to attack sparrows. So you send the dog to a home without chickens; you don’t shoot her. Dogs will defend themselves against a master who they perceive as trying to harm them—and Cricket was right. Hell, I’d try to bite this woman.
Jack,
Did you see the results of Althouse’s poll of her Trump-supporting readership? It looks like 55% picked that the putting down her dog made them like her more, with only 27% saying that they found the incident disqualifying.
I’m not sure what to make of those results. Were I to vote in that poll, I think the incident would disqualify her, simply because it is too easy to beat her to death with it, no matter how justified it is. It doesn’t make me respect her, certainly, because I would think that there would be a number of alternatives than just shooting the dog.
At the same time, I know I’m also quite a softy. I have a cat who is peeing all over the house we moved into here in Ohio — I have to think she’s still angry at our move — and she’s 13 years old and arthritic, and I’m pondering if it might be time to put her down. But then I look into those baby-blue, Siamese eyes (I’m not sure how many different breeds are represented, but I believe there’s Siamese, tabby, and somehow a golden retriever in her background…) and I can’t fathom taking her in, not unless she was completely breaking down. Still, if you have to kill an animal, you should probably be the one to do it, or at least see it through, right?
Well, that does it: I’m cross posting something I put up on Facebook about Grace and a dog we had to euthanize.
Althouse has a strange readership.
Someone I know who raises purebreds tells a similar story with a pup from one of her litters. The pup was sociopathic – if dogs can be diagnosed as such – attacking the owners and other pups viciously. The owner found a farm couple that volunteered to take the pup and try to raise it. A few weeks later they returned it, saying the dog, even at its young age, was a menace.
The breeder kept the dog a little longer, then ended up having to euthanize it.
A couple of thoughts as it relates to Governor Noem. Some stories are just better left untold. It’s not so much that she euthanized the dog, because people do that every day and it’s traumatic. It was the method that’s getting people riled up. Taking it to the gravel pit and shooting it has all the tender, loving notes of a Sopranos-style assassination…you know, “Take Guido to the pit and make sure he isn’t found.” Had she taken it to the vet and let and let the vet shoot it – with excess morphine like what happens to most of our animals – this wouldn’t be a news item. In fact, we could feel somewhat sympathetic to her decision.
Her desire to sound matter-of-fact, maybe even casual, with difficult decisions fits in well with the persona she tries to present as a “no-nonsense, down-home” executive, but this incident does sound harsh to animal lovers, even if there were other circumstances that led to the act.
Finally, I would make note that some of the people decrying Noem shooting an animal are the same ones celebrating a woman’s ability to proverbially “take her unborn child to the gravel pit and shoot it.” Those in THAT camp have NO beef with the governor.
she gave an honest recounting and that is a problem? If NOT knowing this fact makes her an acceptable choice I question your critical thinking skills. Didn’t Obama murder the American citizen and his son in his first term. Farm animals are not “family members , nor are they people.
at least the Hiroshima and Nagasaki discussion involve the humans and not all the creatures annihilated in those events.
TWO problems: 1) killing a dog that was just being a dog. If it wasn’t a suitable hunting dog, then let someone without an itchy trigger finger adopt her. 2) if she is to be a viable politician, then she should not publish self-promoting books that highlight her shortcomings, betrayals, and example of bad judgment. That’s fine if she is quitting and doesn’t need anyone to trust her.
BONUS: she admits the cruel killing because she obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with it.
Yikes. This is a Rationalization #22 cornucopia!
Expanding on point two, she had an ethics alarm ring in recounting the story but chose to ignore it: ““I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here”.
If that sentence was instead an explanation of the animal’s threat of harm to other livestock and additional difficulty in finding it a foster home, she might have skated on a plausible rationalization.
One point for honesty, minus nine for idiocy. I’ll hold my vote for a “better politician”.