South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) in a forthcoming book describes shooting a family dog after a hunting trip, according to a report in The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”
In the book, Noem, who has been discussed as a possible running mate for former President Trump, describes growing angry with the nearly 14-month-old “Cricket,” a wirehaired pointer, during a hunting trip.
Noem shot the dog after taking it on a pheasant hunt.
She writes that she had taken Cricket on the hunt hoping she would learn from older dogs, but that instead the younger dog ruined the hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” per the Guardian.
On the way home, the dog escaped her truck and attacked a local family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” Noem wrote.
When Noem tried to grab the dog, she wrote that it whipped around to bite her. Noem said she wrote the family a check for their chickens and helped them dispose of the carcasses “littering the scene of the crime.”
“I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that Cricket was untrainable, dangerous and worthless as a hunting dog.
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
She then led Cricket to a gravel pit on her property and shot it, writing it was “not a pleasant job” but it “had to be done.”
Noem wrote that she also then killed a “nasty and mean” male goat that smelled and liked to chase her children. Because it jumped when she first shot at the goat, she needed two shots to “put him down.”
The Guardian wrote that the story was told as an anecdote to show that Noem believes sometimes difficult tasks must be carried out, and that she is not afraid to do so. Noem uses the story to illustrate that she is willing to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done, according to The Guardian.
Noem also wrote that she realized that a construction crew watched her kill both animals, but the workers got back to work before a school bus dropped off her kids.
When her daughter arrived, Noem writes in the book that she looked around, confused, asking where Cricket was.
“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote.
When The Hill contacted Noem’s office to ask about the report, it pointed to a tweet from her personal account.
In the tweet, Noem appeared to confirm the story and said there would be more politically incorrect stories in her book.
“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. If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back,’ she wrote.
Updated at 11:43 a.m. ET