Most people caught bragging about how they took a family dog to a rock quarry and murdered it because they “just hated that dog,” might think about shutting up for a moment. Most people might hope that something horrific would appear in the next news cycle to divert the public spotlight and end painful memes about a puppy mounted like a trophy.
But no one would say that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is like most people.
Noem is still going on the air, not to apologize for her dog murder, but to double and triple down on the importance of shooting a 14-month-old German wirehaired pointer. She’s now claiming that she did it because this dog was a danger to her children and “not a puppy.”
RELATED STORY: Kristi Noem’s story of murdering her dog keeps getting worse
Claims that Cricket was a danger to her family weren’t included in the clips of Noem’s forthcoming book that started the dog-murdering controversy. Noem is now calling the reporting of her gunning down her dog “fake news.” Noem went on Fox News to insist that Cricket “was a working dog and it was not a puppy. It was a dog that was extremely dangerous.”
Noem has also added additional details to the story, saying that Cricket came to her “from a family who had found her way too aggressive.” Though Noem insists those who want the full story should read the book, it’s unclear how much of this new information is actually in her upcoming political tome.
Among other things, Noem told Fox that Cricket “attacked me” before repeating her claim that Cricket had to be put down because she “massacred livestock.” By that Noem means that she drove the dog into a yard full of chickens that it had clearly not been trained not to chase.
Left out of this latest iteration was that not only did Noem bring an untrained dog into an area where chickens were running loose, she did so directly after taking the dog on a hunting trip where Cricket had frustrated Noem by enthusiastically flushing and chasing pheasants. Which would seem like a very good signal that the dog had not been trained to control itself around birds.
Neither Noem nor the Fox News pundits pointed out that under South Dakota law chickens are not livestock. Which seems like something a governor might know. But really, that’s the least of the problems with her story.
The actual sequence of events seems to be that Noem was disappointed in Cricket’s performance during the pheasant hunt where it didn’t know how to work with older dogs and unfamiliar people. That disappointment was compounded by embarrassment when her untrained, unleashed dog went after a neighbor’s chickens due to her poor planning.
Noem took that disappointment and embarrassment and focused it into a rage. “I hated that dog,” she wrote. So she took it to a gravel pit and killed it.
After shooting Cricket, Noem was still not satisfied. So she went to her farm, collected a goat she faulted for being cantankerous and smelly (in other words, a goat), took it back to the quarry, and added its body to the growing pile.
And she got all this done before one of her children stepped off the school bus and asked, “Where’s Cricket?”
In her previous defense, Noem also bragged about shooting three horses. This is something that many horse owners have been forced to do in the painful final months of a horse’s life, but isn’t anything that most people would hold up as a matter of pride. Then again, Noem is definitely not like most people.
As the Iowa Capital Dispatch reports, Noem “must have calculated that the memoir, particularly that incident, would add to her contrived narrative as a leader willing to make tough calls and boost her chances of being picked as the GOP VP candidate.”
It seems that Noem is still making that calculation. Only now she’s unsatisfied with just the credit she deserves for hauling an enthusiastic puppy to a gravel pit and putting God who knows how many bullets through its body. Because she hated it. Now she wants bonus points for stopping a dangerous dog. One that attacked her and destroyed “livestock.” One that she claims was a threat to her children.
Kristi Noem took down a monster, dammit. It was not a puppy. Please ignore the wagging tail. Where’s the praise she deserves?
In addition to the dog, the goat, and the horses, it’s unclear how many other bodies she left to rot around the family abattoir. But Noem certainly seems to be gunning for the award as the first Republican in eight years to discover there still is such a thing as “going too far.”
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