South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) recounted a disturbing story about how she killed her family dog.
Noem, who is reportedly on Donald Trump’s short list of possible running mates, included the anecdote in her book, which was obtained by The Guardian before its release next month.
In the book, Noem describes the dog named Cricket, as a female “wirehair pointer, about 14 months old” with an “aggressive personality” and was difficult to control.
Noem writes that she decided to take Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs hoping it would calm the dog down. Instead, Cricket ruined the hunt by being “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
Noem writes that Cricket was uncontrollable and didn’t respond to voice commands and an electric collar.
On their way home, Noem writes that she stopped to speak with a local family when Cricket bolted from her truck and attacked the family’s chickens.
Cricket was “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another” she writes, according to The Guardian. Noem said Cricket tried to bite her when she grabbed the dog.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket was “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment, I realized I had to put her down,” she writes.
Noem said she grabbed her gun and led Cricket to a gravel pit where she executed her.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Noem says when her children got home from school, her daughter Kennedy “looked around confused and asked: ‘Hey, where’s Cricket?'”
Shockingly, Noem’s slaughter of defenseless animals didn’t stop there. She also describes how she “dragged” a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” to a gravel pit and killed it.
Noem writes that the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. The governor says she went back to her truck, got another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.
Noem claims that executing her dog and a goat shows her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
