Some of the comments on this post compel me to cross-post the following story from Facebook, as I continue to try to deal with the sudden loss of my wife on Leap Year. The contrast with Kristi Noem’s cruel and impulsive shooting of a young dog that displeased her didn’t occur to me for some reason until I read the recent posts of readers here.
Today I was driving home from the vet’s with Spuds and his newly drained ear, and “I Will,” Paul’s sweet little song from the White Album came on the radio. (“Who knows how long I’ve loved you…”)
Grace envied singers and always wanted to sing herself, but was convinced that she couldn’t…I tried to tell her that she didn’t have a bad voice and should take some coaching, but she wouldn’t do it. When she wanted to sing, only with me, she deliberately used a fake voice, either a high falsetto or sometimes a weird guttural voice that sounded eerily like Pazuzu in “The Exorcist.”
Grace shared her mother’s and oldest sister Edie’s deep connection to animals: all three loved them so much the animals could sense it. If one of our dogs or Kibber the cat had some wound or problem to be tended to, they would only let Grace do it: it was almost mystical.
When our beloved 160 lb. English Mastiff, Patience, had her cancer return in her seventh year (Grace paid $12,000 for her treatment when the cancer first appeared and didn’t tell me for years…I didn’t mind: Patience was worth it, and it bought her another year), the sweet, sensitive dog was so brave…she had no appetite and was fading away, but she always wagged her huge tail when Grace came near. One day, as we knew Patience was running out of time, I returned from an errand to find Grace lying on the floor with her head at Patience’s ear. She was singing softly in her real voice, “I Will” to Patience as the dog slowly wagged her tail. Grace had tears pouring down her face, and pretty soon, so did I.
Over the next few days, Grace sang that song to Patience every time she seemed uncomfortable or agitated, usually beginning with, “Don’t be afraid!” and then, softly, “Who knows how long I’ve loves you…” And Patience would look into her eyes, and wag.
Three days later, we called a vet who made house visits to come and end our dog’s suffering. We probably waited too long. Patience had to tell us it was time by wandering out of our back yard down the hill into the bamboo; I had to persuade her to come back. She had gone off to die. As the vet fed the fatal drug into the vein in Patience’s leg, Grace was lying right by Patience’s side with her arm around her. She sang “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” until that big tail stopped, and Patience was gone.
I’m so glad that Grace never heard the Kristi Noem story.
Ethics Alarms 
The way I read Noem’s story, is that the dog was fundamentally bad and therefore unpredictably dangerous. Dogs that can’t be trusted should be put down. That it was by a bullet rather than a vet seems irrelevant.
How do you read it that way? It’s just not in the story as it is related to us, anyway. If she was that convinced that the dog was “bad”,” why did she take it hunting? Any dog might kill chickens, as I already mentioned. The dog protecting itself when she was grabbing it? That is a dog being a dog. There are very few , if any, “fundamentally bad dogs.” That’s the theory behind the dangerous breed laws.
The dog not only slaughtered chickens, it bit people. It couldn’t be trusted.
Also, I’m not getting how shooting a dog that kills chickens is any different than shooting a dog that can’t be stopped doing the same thing.
I’m not a farmer, but I’m good friends with a family who are. They make decisions the rest of us never have to deal with.
Ignorant and misleading comment, Jeff. It was a young dog in an unfamiliar and stressful environment. It didn’t “kill chickens,” it killed those chickens that were a new experience for the dog. My next door neighbor’s dog kills squirrels, and if you suddenly put it in the middle of birds that couldn’t fly away, it would probably kill them. Dogs don’t just bite unless they are under stress, have been abused, feel threatened, or have been badly trained. In very rare cases, as with my poor Basset Hound, a dog will have a mental issue, but again, that is rare. Pit Bulls that have been abused and trained to be aggressive can be brought to be safe and obedient. Noem got angry at one extreme instance and shot her dog. There’s no excuse for that.
She didn’t say he actually bit her, just “whipped around to bite me”, and only after she grabbed him. No mention if he snapped at open air or if he actually gave her a painful bite. And regarding appeals to authority, here’s a tweet from the thread where she tries to defend her actions:
What an amazing story, Jack – thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Mrs. OB and I are off dogs. We both grew up with dogs and have had dogs non-stop since we acquired Pokey, a great Airedale (registered as Dawson’s Biff Pocaroba on her AKC papers, mostly as a joke) nearly fifty years ago so our then young kids would have a dog. We had to put our last pair of dachshunds down a couple of years ago. They had each timed out. You can put dogs down when you’re younger. It’s nearly impossible to do when you’re old. As the late, great Sam Kinnison revealed, “Oh! Dogs are great! They’re wonderful. AND THEN THEY DIE!!!”
Yeah, so do wives and friends (and Sam Kinison).
Like all the others you list, Sam was gone way too soon, and as the result of a freak accident.
But new, replacement dogs are optional.
She had a very easy alternative course of action: Give the dog to someone else and let them see what they could do with it.
OB, I totally agree.
There was a story on these pages a couple of years back about a couple – YouTube influencers or something – that put their dog down because of a situation with an infant, though I can’t remember the details. Why didn’t this couple send the dog elsewhere to see if it would adapt to a different situation?
I would ask the same of Ms. Noem. The dog we had for 3+ years came to us in that exact situation…needing a change of venue to stay alive. Bailey was an incredible addition and I will treasure that time until my last breath – and beyond that, if possible. Owners who put their dogs down before attempting to give them a second chance with a new owner deprive that second owner of a first chance to love and care for that dog. It’s a tragedy.
South Dakota’s governor appears to have lacked the foresight to think of the dog’s needs and what might work best for it. And then, to write about euthanizing her dog using a method more familiar to mob-style executions…surely, she had to know how that would read.
Her ethics alarms are not as strong as I first considered.
Some states have laws on the books which prevent you from doing that. If a dog is known to be aggressive and you give it away to someone else, you retain the liability for the dog hurting someone. My parents ran into this when I was a kid. We had a dog that seemed to just be crazy. She bit everyone. My father spent hours everyday for a year working with the dog, but it made no difference. So they tried taking her to obedience training. On the last day of obedience training she bit the trainer. Then my parents got orders to move, and because of the laws in the state we lived in at the time, it was illegal to take the dog out of the state or give/sell her to someone else. They had to have her euthanized.
Not that that seems to apply to the Noem puppy killing, but in general you have to check the applicable laws.
“you retain the liability for the dog hurting someone”
Unless they waive that liability, which is what usually they must do. I’m pretty sure that the family that re-homed Chief with us knew he had the attacking issue, and just foisted him off on us, but I couldn’t prove it. So we had to handle the guilt and heartbreak.
Jack, I am so sorry your wife died, truly. Don’t let this story and your tragedy get mixed up.
Are folks not seeing that they are judging this based on a few sentences in a damn book. Farmers have done similar for millennia. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, seems a poor decision in HINDSIGHT. Putting it in a book, ill-advised. Choosing a different politician who hasn’t told us such a story, who cares. It is hard enough to apply ethics to humans, let alone a farm dog, not a pet, not a family member, a dog.
Who would based on their public and political performance would make a better, viable VP? If you don’t have an alternative other than “None of the above”, find one or move on.
Humans suck, politicians are currently not the best examples of us, the world is as it is.
I’m going to assume it was an expensive, pure-bred dog acquired from a breeder specializing in and known for breeding excellent pointers. Why not return the dog to the breeder and get a refund or another puppy?
Putting it in a book shows dead ethics alarms as well as ignorance of public values. We accepted Old Yeller’s death at the end of gun because the dog had rabies. If Yeller had just killed a couple of chickens, I guarantee the movie would have been a flop, and deserved to be.
Ann Althouse finally weighed in on this issue today, including a nice debunking of the minor Big Lie that Trump doesn’t like dogs because he didn’t have one in the White House. Most, not all, White House pets are props
“Are folks not seeing that they are judging this based on a few sentences in a damn book.”
But it’s a book that she wrote (or, quite possibly, had a hand in writing) that is serving as a type of campaign promotion so it was in her best interests to make sure that stories that place her a bad light be left out or explained more thoroughly.
I haven’t read the book so I don’t know what specifically was written about the dog’s temperament. All I was aware that was printed was how she couldn’t get the dog to catch birds, hated the dog and executed it via the gravel pit.
Did she include any other details about the dog’s personality problems, attacking people, etc, in the book itself or has that just come out since people found out about Cricket?
She’s been trying to excuse the killing of the dog ever since this information became public despite knowing ahead of time that it would be upsetting to some readers. Keeping it in the book anyway without any further description of the dog’s other problems was foolish and whoever the PR person advising her is who didn’t frantically implore her to omit it should be fired.
Our host’s original post on the matter linked to the Daily Mail article that quotes the passage from the book. In a nutshell, the dog went chasing the birds on the hunt, then killed some chickens on the way back, snapping at its owner when she tried grab it. Concerning, but not grounds fir instant death.
Jack,
That final paragraph of your post was difficult to read without getting emotional. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about Bailey’s last minutes with us. They are like yours and Grace’s with Patience, though we were at the vet clinic. I still won’t park in the spot where we loaded her up for that last trip to the vet.
Thank you for sharing it, though I’m a little choked up now.
Me too. Still.
Ignorant and misleading comment, Jeff. It was a young dog in an unfamiliar and stressful environment. It didn’t “kill chickens,” it killed those chickens that were a new experience for the dog.
I was only going on what Noem herself said:
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
Emphasis added. While they may be few, bad dogs do exist. Perhaps this was one. Neither of us has any information to contradict Noem’s characterization of the animal; therefore, I can’t think of any reason not to take it at face value.
If I had a dog that I couldn’t trust not to attack people, I sure as heck am not going to attempt to re-home the it no matter how much liability is waived. It would be an ethical failure to pass off a foreseeable hazard. That dog needed putting down.
I’m sure this will come as a shock to many, but most animals on ranches are not pets, no matter their species. This dog may have become a pet, had it other redeeming values.
It didn’t.
(Full disclosure: I have had one dog, a lug-nut smart Golden Retriever.)
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
1. No dog is proven “untrainable” in 14 months.
2. “Dangerous” is a subjective characterization. There are cities that regard my dog as “dangerous” as a matter of law, just by existing.
3. No where does she say the dog bit anyone.
4. She shot it because the dog was “worthless as a hunting dog.” The assholes who had Spuds before we did got him as a guard dog and attack dog, and he’s “worthless” for that. He’s lucky they didn’t shoot him. They just starved him and made him live in a bathroom where he had to sleep in his own excrement.
My wife would advocate shooting Spuds’ owners.
“Dangerous” is a subjective characterization.
Indeed. And she was in the unfortunate position of only having first hand knowledge to go on.
She shot it because the dog was “worthless as a hunting dog.”
You are assuming a fact not in evidence. If it was a great hunting dog, but still dangerous to anyone it met, then Noem may well still have shot it. We can’t know either way, but dangerous, all on its own, is sufficient cause. In a lot of places, one unprovoked biting incident is enough to get a dog put down.
The Federalist defends Noem
[Prof Labato] might have used this teaching moment as an opportunity to explain why farmers and ranchers can’t afford to let sentimentality factor into their thinking; or why, once a dog has killed and tasted the blood of livestock, it is practically impossible to break him of the habit or to prevent him from teaching other dogs to do the same; or how law, both foreign and domestic, traditionally takes a very dim view of such dogs, allowing them to be euthanized or even requiring it; or why the morality of people living in cities evolves differently than that of those living in rural areas; or how our feelings are not always the right guide to moral action …
Noem’s killing the dog was immoral. Noam killing a chicken-killing coyote would be fine. Odd.
1. Not “immoral.” No moral codes mention killing animals out of spite.
2. Chickens are not livestock.
3. From what we have seen, she gave no evidence or account of the dog biting anyone. The dog defended itself when she was dragging it to be killed. As would I.
4. Yes, farms are routinely cruel to animals. but we don’t eat dogs. Well, Obama, but not most of us…
Oh, I forgot to add: I sure as heck would put Commander down.
Joe had two biting German Shepherds, and they both may well have been put down. Every German Shepherd owner I have talked to is furious about the Biden dog situation—I’ve had conversations with four. The White House is a terrible place for a dog: Trump hass been branded as a “dog-hater” because he has eschewed that prop, but he’s the responsible one. If you don’t have time to care for a dog properly, don’t get a dog.
I have to stop now and feed, walk, and console Spuds…
I don’t think Trump is a dog hater. I remember he said he didn’t have the time needed to dedicate to a pet. That seems awfully responsible in my never-to-be-humble opinion.
We took a long time before we were blessed with Lord Remington Winchester Burger, I, Esq., Dog of Letters, whose magnificence expands exponentially every day.
Remy is great – very calm, gentle to a fault (except with the dreaded squirrels and/or errant cat), and has never displayed aggression toward other dogs or persons (save and except the dreaded squirrel and errant cat). He is smart fellow and easy to control – but he has always been thus. We got him as a rescue when he was about 5 months old. He is a mix, probably chocolate lab and pit, maybe doberman (his features are more angular than boxy/stout) but he is spectacular, a little barky as of late, but, hey, those falling leaves simply need a good barking – yes, even at 3:30 in the frickin’ morning!
I tend to agree with Althouse thoughts:
“Althouse Theory No. 1: There were witnesses, so the story would almost surely come out in some form eventually, and Noem chose to control the narrative, telling it in her own words, in her book.”
* * *
“Althouse Theory No. 3: Noem wanted to counter a stereotype about women, that we are too empathetic and indecisive, and she thought the anecdote about shooting the chicken-killing, person-biting dog showed her fitness to serve as Commander in Chief.”
jvb
If she really thinks that showing you can shoot a pet is going to appeal to anyone, male or female, she’s a dangerous idiot.
I see she is trying the “that’s in the past” rationalization, making a point of noting that it was 20 years ago.
In her defense—stop making me defend Kristy Noem!—the now accepted narrative that she shot a “puppy” is garbage. 14 months is a young dog, but a full grown one except in the giant breeds. It’s like calling a 19-year-old a child.
Animals are a little slice of Heaven on Earth.
My mother passed in 2022 and loved her pooch’s like your Grace, I inherited her sweet little tuxedo loved kitty tuxedo kitty. One of his many names is Lovesponge.
Thank you for sharing.