Reaching for an example of her unflinching preparedness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it needs to be done, Kristi Noem landed on a chilling example: the time she killed her pet dog, Cricket, in an execution-style gravel pit slaying.
The South Dakota governor, whose unbreakable devotion to Donald Trump has propelled her to somewhere near the top of his list of his potential 2024 running mates, reportedly included her disturbing tale of canicide in a book set to be published next month. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem writes, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy.
According to the newspaper, Noem recounts the story of how she not only killed Cricket—a female “wirehair pointer, about 14 months old”—but then also proceeded to botch the killing of an unnamed goat that she owned to which she had taken a disliking.
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Noem reportedly writes in her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, that Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and that Noem hoped taking her on a pheasant hunt with older dogs would help to calm the young Cricket down. Instead, Noem writes that Cricket spoiled the hunt by being “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
The Republican reportedly writes that she failed to get Cricket under control with voice commands and an electronic collar, but then an even worse incident occurred after the hunt had ended. While traveling home, Noem writes that she stopped to speak to a local family—at which point Cricket escaped her truck and set about killing the family’s chickens, getting hold of one bird at a time, “crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
The governor reportedly writes that Cricket tried to bite her when she eventually managed to grab the dog. The governor adds that she apologized profusely to the chickens’ weeping owner and cut the traumatized family a check “for the price they asked.” She also stuck around to help to clear up the aftermath of the massacre.
“I hated that dog,” Noem reportedly writes, adding that Cricket was simply “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.” It was then that she realized “I had to put her down,” she adds.
Noem explains that she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “But it had to be done.” Afterward, she writes, she decided she also needed to kill a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, complaining that the buck “loved to chase” Noem’s children around and would wreck their clothes by knocking them down.
She reportedly writes of the goat that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” like Cricket, but the killing did not go as smoothly. The goat jumped when she pulled the trigger, Noem says, meaning the goat survived the shot. She adds that she went to her truck to get another shell and then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
Noem says that a construction crew had seen her killing both the dog and the goat. She also writes that when her daughter, Kennedy, came home from school, she “looked around confused” and asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
