Kristi Noem Describes Executing Puppy She 'Hated' in New Book
Noem describes in excruciating detail the brief life of Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haird pointer puppy she intended to use as a pheasant-hunting dog.
Noem describes Cricket as having an “aggressive” personality she hoped to calm by taking the dog on a hunt. According to the governor, Cricket didn’t so much hunt as have “the time of her life” chasing birds and going “out of her mind with excitement.”
This would not do for Noem, who attempted to rein in Cricket with verbal commands and a shock collar before declaring the hunt a wash because an untrained puppy had a playful romp rather than read its owner’s mind.
On their way home, Noem made a pit stop at the home of some locals who owned chickens. Cricket, fresh off her joyous bird-chasing romp, escaped the truck and began terrorizing the chickens, Noem writes.
“Like a trained assassin,” Noem writes, Cricket began “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” While it is legal in South Dakota to kill a “dog found chasing, worrying, injuring, or killing poultry or domestic animals,” it’s by no means required, and there’s no indication the owners of the chicken made any such demand.
According to The Guardian’s review, multiple chickens lost their lives before Noem finally intervened to restrain Cricket, who she described as “the picture of joy” throughout the ordeal. When the governor attempted to grab her dog, Cricket allegedly made to bite her. They say dogs are like their owners, and after paying the distraught family for the value of their chickens, Noem was apparently seized by a similar deadly urge.
“I hated that dog,” Noem recalls, calling Cricket, “less than worthless as a hunting dog,” “untrainable,” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
“At that moment […] I realized I had to put her down,” the governor recalls.
Noem dragged Cricket to a gravel pit, and shot her dead in front of a startled construction crew. “It was not a pleasant job but it had to be done,” she recounts
