South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will be the featured speaker at this Saturday’s fundraising dinner for the Jefferson County Republican Party. Noem, who is on Donald Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, was already widely known as a conservative firebrand, but she returned to the headlines today after the Guardian published excerpts from her new book, “No Going Back,” which includes her graphic recounting of killing a 14-month old puppy for being a bad hunting dog.
After shooting her puppy with her shotgun, she writes that she “realized another unpleasant job needed to be done,” and shoots one of her family’s goats, because he smelled bad and liked to head-butt her children.
In response to widespread backlash, Noem released a statement defending her decision to kill her pets, even as reports circulate that the story may have ended her vice presidential hopes.
Asked by the Colorado Times Recorder if this news caused any concerns for next Saturday’s fundraiser, Jeffco GOP Chair Nancy Pallozzi said she wasn’t aware of the story and declined to comment until she was familiar with it. This article will be updated with any response received.
As the Guardian reports:
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, 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”.
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin.”
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“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”.
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
Noem spoke in Colorado last year at the Steamboat Institute’s Freedom Conference in Beaver Creek.
Reached for comment, state Rep. Brianna Titone (D-Arvada), who is both a dog owner and gun owner, offered the following statement:
“When someone demonstrates how they treat an animal, it is a good indicator of who that person is, deep down,” said Titone. “I think that many people would consider her lack of humanity a red flag. It definitely seems to track in her record as Governor. The Jeffco Republicans should know better than invite someone who clashes so strongly with Coloradans’ love for animals.”
The Jefferson County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner is being held at the Denver Marriott West in Golden this Saturday evening. Tickets, which start at $150 and range as high as $12,000 for VIP table sponsors, are still available.
