South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who is widely tipped to be former President Donald Trump’s likely pick as running mate, has admitted shooting dead one of her dogs for being “less than worthless” — and similarly killing a goat she found “disgusting.”
The 52-year-old Republican detailed the killings in an upcoming memoir as proof she is willing to do “difficult, messy and ugly” things when needed, according to the Guardian, which obtained an advance copy.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” she said of the soon-to-be-shot pup with an “aggressive personality” that made her “untrainable.”
Noem took Cricket on a hunt to learn from other dogs — but she instead ruined the hunt by going “out of her mind with excitement” and attacking some chickens like a “trained assassin,” Noem wrote.
When Noem tried to grab the dog, it “whipped around to bite me,” she wrote.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling Cricket “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, explained that she then got her gun and led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”
She recalled how her daughter, Kennedy “looked around confused” when she came home from school that day, asking: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
The report did not say exactly when Cricket was killed. But it was not the only animal the politician writes about shooting dead.
Noem also detailed how she killed a “nasty and mean” male goat because it had not been castrated.
She described the animal as smelling “disgusting, musky, rancid” and claimed it “loved to chase” Noem’s children and knock them down.
The goat was also “dragged to a gravel pit,” but jumped when she pulled the trigger, and subsequently survived the wound. Noem went back to her truck to retrieve another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down,” she wrote.
“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she concluded the story.
A construction crew witnessed her kill both animals, she said in the book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which is due to be published next month.
Noem — whom Trump has said is on his shortlist to run as Vice President — addressed the report Friday while plugging the upcoming book.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she wrote on X alongside a screenshot of the Guardian article.
“Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back,’” she wrote along with a link.