Kristi Noem is tripling down.
For over a week the Republican governor of South Dakota has been dogged by critics from across the political spectrum. In her forthcoming book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward,” Noem describes shooting dead her own 14-month-old pup, Cricket, after Cricket killed a neighbor’s chickens and appeared, in Noem’s view, dangerous to humans. (Noem also described killing her “disgusting, musky” goat, a death that has generated far less public outrage.)
Noem has faced widespread backlash from Democrats and members of her own party over her tale of canine execution. Instead of backpedaling, however, she has stuck by her guns — and has even gone on the offensive.
Whether reasonable or not, Americans have a fanatical love of dogs and attentiveness to their welfare.
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” Noem said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation, referring to Biden’s dog Commander, who was exiled from the White House in the fall after repeatedly biting Secret Service agents. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it? … That’s the question that the president should be held accountable to.”
When “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked, “You’re saying he should be shot?” Noem repeated, “That’s what the president should be accountable to.”
Those comments were made just before The Guardian reported Monday that in another, previously undisclosed, passage of her book, Noem implies that she would be willing to execute Commander herself. Contemplating what she would do as her first act as president, she wrote, “The first thing I’d do is make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds. (‘Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.’)”
There’s something Trumpian about Noem’s decision to attack others before conceding any ground on the matter. But it doesn’t seem to be working. Whether reasonable or not, Americans have a fanatical love of dogs and attentiveness to their welfare, and Noem’s tack seems to be backfiring — including with former President Donald Trump, who had reportedly been eyeing her as a vice presidential pick.
In Noem’s original story, she says that she “hated” Cricket and felt obligated to kill him after the dog revealed itself to be “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless” as a hunting dog. In her defense of the story after it went public, Noem has claimed she had attempted to train the dog for months and had taken it to other trainers.
Animal behavior experts told The New York Times that nonlethal tools were available to Noem before putting down the dog, including medication and other behavioral interventions. And notably, at 14 months old, it would seem that Cricket was still maturing into an adult.
Regardless of whether or not Noem behaved ethically or reasonably, the firestorm of controversy around her tale underscores how dogs have long served as symbols of innocence in political rhetoric and as a means for politicians to build trust or arouse the suspicion of the public. In 1952, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon famously deflected accusations of receiving inappropriate gifts in part by talking about how he couldn’t help but hang on to a gift cocker spaniel that his daughters had fallen in love with. In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney faced widespread condemnation over a story in which he described strapping a dog carrier — with his dog Seamus inside — to the roof of his station wagon on a family vacation. In the 2020 special Senate elections, Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock walked a dog that wasn’t his in political ads to present a wholesome image and cut against racist stereotypes of Black men as dangerous among white voters.
Noem’s predicament is all the more striking because it was self-induced. She had included killing Cricket in a draft of her previous memoir but had been advised to ax it out of concern it would hurt her politically. This time the anecdote made it to the printing press, and the response to it makes it clear those who advised her to take it out of the previous book were right.
Now multiple reports based on whispers in Trump’s inner circle imply that Noem has either lost her spot on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, that she faces steeper odds of being chosen because of the Cricket story, or that she slid off the shortlist for other reasons and her story about killing her dog has foreclosed any hopes she had of making it back on it. In any case, it’s safe to say she did a lot of damage to herself.
It’s all rather strange what makes for a giant political scandal in this country. Despite how systematically cruel we are toward animals in the livestock industry or how much politicians can get away with advocating for and aiding the deaths of innocent humans, dogs tend to evoke a spirited and protective reaction from Americans. And there’s something head-spinning about Trump’s happily embracing Nazi-esque rhetoric about immigrants yet viewing a story about killing a potentially dangerous dog as a political liability. But regardless of the merits, even Trump knows there are some things you can’t get away with politically. Executing a dog is on that short list.
