(RepublicanJournal.org) – South Dakota’s Republican Governor Kristi Noem is no stranger to making headlines. She has been a prominent figure in the news since the days of the pandemic and even now, as she is considered a candidate to run alongside former President Donald Trump. However, an older story about the governor shooting one of her dogs recently surfaced, and now she’s receiving a lot of backlash.
Noem’s memoir, “No Going Back,” is coming out, and The Guardian was able to secure an advance copy, which it published in a few excerpts. One of those centers on Noem shooting a 14-month-old puppy, a wirehair pointer named Cricket. She had planned on using the female dog to hunt pheasants, but she noted that the dog had an “aggressive personality.”
The governor details her experience in how training Cricket went wrong, and as a result she had to put the dog down. Noem had taken the young pup out with the older dogs with the hopes they would guide Cricket and show her what to do, but the puppy had other ideas.
Noem wrote that the dog went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and nothing worked to control her, not even an electronic collar. When Noem stopped off at a friend’s before heading home, she details how Cricket jumped out of the car and grabbed some of the family’s chickens, acting like “a trained assassin.” Writing further, Noem said she “hated that dog” and called it “less than worthless.”
While her inclusion of the story was to show that she is willing to do the “difficult, messy and ugly” tasks that politics would require of her, it struck a nerve in many people who took to social media to express their disgust with her actions.
Noem defended her actions in a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying that it’s a part of life and she just recently had to put some horses down, too. One user responded that Noem “just put down [her] VP chances too. Like, all the way down.” The post had received more than 10 million views as of the time of writing.
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