"I hated that dog" -- Kristi Noem explaining why she shot one of her dogs in the local gravel pit.
I just got back from working the system and made a few bucks so I can post some more today. I did little research online and I got more of the story behind Kristi putting her dog down. I would not want to be one of her animals on her farm. She says in her soon-to-be released memoir that the dog, Cricket, was "untrainable" and "dangerous" and "she hated that dog."
After deciding she needed to be put down, Ms Noem led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.
"It was not a pleasant job," she wrote. "But it had to be done."
The memoir, titled No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, is due for release on 7 May, though an excerpt was
obtained by The Guardian.
The tale garnered several reactions from people online, prompting Ms Noem to defend herself in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
She wrote: "We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm."
"Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years."
Ms Noem, who
dropped out (clever words from the writer) of college at age 22 to run her family farm in South Dakota, wrote in the memoir of trying to teach Cricket, a 14-month old wirehaired pointer, how to behave by taking her on a pheasant hunt with some older dogs.
But attempts to discipline her, including using an electronic collar, failed, she said.
On the way home from the hunt, she stopped to talk to a local family when Cricket escaped and attacked their chickens, "grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite." (side note, my wife's dog ISIS killed three baby chickens the other day and killed the mother the next day. I did not shoot my wife's dog because that dog was just doing what a wolf dog would do, eat a chicken)
She said that the dog "whipped around to bite me" when she tried to bring it under control and that during the incident, Cricket was "the picture of pure joy".
After apologising to the family for the dog's behaviour, she said she realised it had to be put down.
"I hated that dog," she said.
The situation made her realise "another unpleasant job needed to be done" that day - getting rid of a male goat her family owned.
The goat was "nasty and mean", smelled "disgusting, musky, rancid", and would chase her young children, knocking them down.
Ms Noem said she shot down the goat in the same manner as Cricket, though the goat survived the first bullet, forcing her to go back to her truck to retrieve another shell.
