Even Mitt Romney acknowledges that the blunder by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem in admitting that she shot and killed an unruly dog on her farm is pretty much a deal breaker.
At the same time, the Republican governor is scrambling to save what many saw as a promising political career — she is/was reportedly on the shortlist to be former President Donald Trump’s veep.
Appearing on Fox News’s “Hannity,” Noem tried to explain the anecdote in her upcoming book, aptly titled No Going Back, where she took a 14-month-old German wirehaired pointer to a gravel pit at her ranch and shot it, writing: “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.”
“Well, you know, how the fake news works. They leave out some or most of the facts,” Noem told host Sean Hannity, further explaining that this was a “working dog, not a puppy.”
“It was a dog that was extremely dangerous,” she said. “It had come to us from a family who had found her way too aggressive.”
“We were her second chance. And she was — the day she was put down was a day that she massacred livestock that were part of our neighbors,” Noem added. “She attacked me. And it was a hard decision.”
Noem said she had to make a choice between “keeping my small children and other people safe, or a dangerous animal, and I chose the safety of my children.”
To her credit, Noem did write in the book that the dog attacked a family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
The book said “Cricket” was an untrainable dog that behaved like “a trained assassin,” and that when she tried to grab the dog it “whipped around to bite me.”
“I hated that dog,” Noem penned, adding that Cricket was “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
And while she said it was at that moment she “realized I had to put her down,” Noem did not mention concern for her children in the book.
It certainly didn’t help her cause when she added that she decided to put down a “mean and nasty” goat at the same time, though she did mention her children then.
Noem said the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” her children and knock them down, ruining their clothes.
Prior to appearing on Hannity, the governor took to social media to add context to a story that’s proving to be a disaster:
I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book — No Going Back. The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons…
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 28, 2024
Sen. Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign was beset with an old tale about him tying his dog Seamus to the roof of his car on a family road trip, but he rejects any comparisons to Noem.
“I didn’t shoot my dog,” he told HuffPost. “I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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