South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s second memoir is set to be released next month and, according to her publisher, the book will be “packed with surprising stories.”
The publisher isn’t wrong.
According to the first excerpts made public from “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward” — which The Guardian obtained exclusively — Noem details how she killed a young dog named Cricket with an “aggressive personality.”
According to The Guardian, Noem recounts taking the female wirehaired pointer on a pheasant hunt, but Cricket went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.” On the way home, as Noem visited with a family, the roughly 14-month-old dog attacked the family’s chickens and then “whipped around to bite” her owner.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, according to The Guardian. She also describes Cricket as “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” Noem writes that she knew right then that the dog had to be put down, so she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” she writes.
Shockingly, that’s not the book’s only such anecdote.
Noem also recalls putting down a “nasty and mean” goat after dragging it to a gravel pit right after killing Cricket, per The Guardian. But the goat jumped as Noem fired her gun and was merely wounded, so she retrieved another shell from her truck to finish the job. A startled construction crew nearby witnessed both killings, Noem writes.
Putting down sick or overly aggressive animals is par for the course for homesteaders and farmers, and Noem — who is on the shortlist to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick — writes that she included the story about Cricket to show that she’s willing to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if required, per The Guardian.
A startled construction crew nearby witnessed both killings, Noem writes.
But why she felt that those incidents — and the specific descriptions of how she killed the animals — was the best way to prove her strength of character is a mystery.
Needless to say, those stories have not been received well. Noem’s office did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment, but the governor went on the defense in a post on X.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she wrote, promising additional “real, honest, and politically INcorrect” stories in her forthcoming book.
Here’s hoping the stories don’t include any more animal killings.
