The Story of an Ill-Behaved Bitch

Remember Mitt Romney, who strapped his dog Seamus to the roof of his car for a 12-hour road trip? And Florida senator and Medicare fraudster Rick Scott, who adopted a dog when he ran for governor, named him Reagan, and then abandoned him for doing dog things?  Well now we have South Dakota governor (and college dropout) Kristi Noem.  She was previously best known as the COVID-denying governor of one of America’s top rectangular states-- but she has now added dog killer to her résumé.  In a new book to be released next month and shared with The Guardian, Noem says she killed her “untrainable” 14-month-old hunting dog Cricket after it ate a local family’s chickens. 

According to Noem, Cricket was an incorrigible dog. So incorrigible that at one point, Noem used an electronic collar to force the dog to behave. That didn’t work, and one day on the way home from a pheasant hunt—which Cricket ruined by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life” (i.e., acting like a dog)—Cricket attacked a local family’s chickens, grabbing them "one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

Noem, who had just witnessed Cricket's enthusiasm with wild birds, didn't stop to think that she couldn't be trusted in the presence of domesticated birds.  Instead, she decided that it was her dog's fault, and decided to get rid of her. “I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, claiming she was “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” (no evidence of that, btw).  Noem decided that Cricket was “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” and  that she “had to put her down.”

Oh, but she wasn’t done. As it happens, her dog murder touched off a mini-killing spree. “After it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”  And that’s when she iced the goat. 

Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

The story was met with widespread condemnation online.  The Democratic National Committee said: "If you want elected officials who don't brag about brutally killing their pets... vote Democrat."   Meghan McCain, the daughter of 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain, said: "You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc - but not from killing a dog."