South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a potential running mate for Donald Trump, discusses her experiences with animal euthanasia in her upcoming book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” According to The Guardian, Noem describes shooting and killing her puppy named Cricket, whom she deemed “less than worthless,” after a failed attempt to train the dog for hunting pheasants.
In the book, Noem recounts her efforts to control the aggressive female puppy, including using an electronic collar. Despite her attempts, Cricket exhibited uncontrollable behavior, particularly during a local pheasant hunt. On their way home from the hunt, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked a family’s chickens, killing multiple birds in quick succession. Noem tried to control the situation but ended up apologizing to the family, writing a check for the damages, and helping clean up the scene.
Noem ultimately decided that Cricket was too dangerous and decided to put her down, leading the dog to a gravel pit and shooting her. She describes the act as unpleasant but necessary.
In another story from the book, Noem shares how she killed a male goat, which she described as “nasty and mean.” This goat, which had not been castrated, had a rancid odor and terrorized Noem’s children by knocking them down.
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 apologized, 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.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”
