South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a top contender to run as vice president alongside Donald Trump, shot and killed a 14-month-old puppy named Cricket. In her book, No Going Back, she recounts the ordeal with chilling apathy; this is not an Old Yeller situation where the puppy was ill or grievously injured, oh no. She slaughtered this innocent creature because she decided that the puppy was “less than worthless” and “untrainable.” To kill a healthy companion animal due to your own incompetence at training said animal is beyond cruel, yet this sycophant brags about taking the puppy to a gravel pit and shooting it, an inhumane form of euthanasia. Dear God, Kristi Noem, you could have just put Cricket up for adoption or surrendered him to a shelter – you didn’t have to kill him.
Yet, the senseless animal abuse does not stop there. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done,” Noem wrote. She then unleashed her rage on the family goat, which she called “nasty and mean.” She took the goat to the same gravel pit and shot it, although the goat did not die instantly, so she reloaded her gun and shot the goat a second time.
If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it’s that killing a puppy is an unforgivable act only committed by the most psychopathic, evil people. Hell, the incredible John Wick series was kicked off by the murder of a beloved puppy. Noem wrote that her daughter seemed confused when she came home from school, asking, “Hey, where’s Cricket?” My heart breaks for that little girl.
While Noem tries to play this down as simply what happens on farms, I beg her to look at animal welfare laws that all farms are subject to follow. “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. The simple solution, rather than going on a rampage and killing two innocent, healthy animals, would be to put the puppy up for adoption and sell the goat, or send it to a rescue. Living on a farm does not give you the power to kill whatever animal you see fit, especially when those animals are not federally tagged for production purposes.
Noem was too ill-equipped to train a sweet little puppy, so she took out her inadequacy on an innocent animal. Rather than feel shame over slaughtering animals for no reason other than anger, she brags about it like it shows how strong she is. No, Noem, you look like a psychopath. This will not win the hearts of American voters.
Justice for Cricket.
