Some are wondering why South Dakota's Governor included her animal killing spree in her upcoming memoir. "She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done." There is also a story about a wayward aggressive goat that was dealt with decisively, that is to say with a bullet to the brain.

On Trump's shortlist for running-mate, Noem must think such anecdotes paint in a good light. They don't. Far from it.

Source: The Guardian

“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.

What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.

Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.

And why did Noem shoot her hunting dog? In her own words: “I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.

Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.

Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.

When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.

I suspect the chicken-killing spree story is made up, tagged on later to somehow absolve herself of blame, and that in reality Noem was just inept at training the dog and took the easiest route to getting rid of a problem. I don't know that, but politicians like Noem bring out my cynical side. And in the end, it doesn't really matter anyway. The dog didn't need to die.

So why would Noem include the dog-killing story?

She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

Now think about that for a second. She's not blaming herself, because the dog was "untrainable." She's blaming the dog. But no dog is completely untrainable. That's what tens of thousands of years of interaction and conditioning by humans have bred into dogs. She was simply shit at training so she took the ugly and quickest exit route, unfortunately for Cricket.

She got her gun and then led Cricket to a gravel pit. And it seems we know about these incidents (the dog and the goat) because a construction crew had watched her kill both animals.

Rick Wilson's take echoes my own opinions of Noem, which were already negative, now even lower.

Cruelty is indeed the point.