Hillary Clinton wades in on Trump VP candidate Kristi Noem’s shocking confession about shooting her dog
South Dakota governor has come under fire over an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir where she admits to shooting her dog Cricket dead
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Your support makes all the difference.Hillary Clinton has become the latest figure to troll South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem over her shocking admission that she executed her dog because it was “untrainable”.
On Monday morning, the former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate reshared a 2021 post on X reading: “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog.”
“Still true,” Ms Clinton wrote alongside the post.
Ms Noem – one of the candidates believed to be in the running to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick – has come under fire in recent days over an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir where she admits to shooting her dog Cricket dead.
In the extract, obtained by The Guardian, Ms Noem describes the 14-month-old do as “untrainable” and “less than worthless”.
She writes that she went on a pheasant hunting trip with other hunting dogs with the intention of teaching the puppy how to behave.
However, she says Cricket went “out of her mind with excitement” and scared off the birds.
Despite Ms Noem’s attempts to control Cricket with an electronic collar, the animal later attacked a group of chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” she writes.
Cricket also later attempted to bite the governor herself, she adds.
“I hated that dog,” Ms Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proven herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment… I realised I had to put her down,” she writes.
Ms Noem describes how she then took out her gun and took the dog to a gravel pit on her property to be executed.
“It was not a pleasant job but it had to be done,” she writes.
In the memoir, she also claims to have put down an unnamed, family-owned goat because he was “nasty and mean”.
Her revelations about killing animals have sparked outrage, with some describing her as “sick and twisted” and “trash”.
“I’m not sure why anyone would brag about this unless they’re sick and twisted,” former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews wrote on X. “Kristi Noem is trash,” Rick Wilson, of anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, added.
Colleen O’Brien, senior director of PETA, also slammed Ms Noem, telling The Independent that she had failed to understand “vital” concepts such as “compromise and compassion”.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) mocked Ms Noem, dubbing itself the “Dogmocratic Party”.
“As DNC’s canine companions, we’ve heard a lot from our owners about just how extreme and dangerous Donald Trump and his far-right MAGA allies are — but nothing could prepare us for the truly disturbing and horrifying passages Kristi Noem willingly chose to put in her new book,” the statement said.
Ms Noem has since responded to the criticism and defended her actions in a statement posted on X.
She said that sharing the story shows her constituents that she is “authentic, willing to learn from the past, and [doesn’t] shy away from tough challenges”.
“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, ”Ms Noem wrote on Sunday on X. “The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned.
“If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back’,” she added.
Her 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.
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