Kristi Noem defends killing dog: ‘Cricket had shown aggressive behavior’

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, on Sunday again defended killing a family dog and goat on her farm, two days after the Guardian revealed how she describes those actions in a forthcoming book.

“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,” Noem wrote on Twitter/X.

“The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned.”

Noem’s book comes out in May. The Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem recounts the story of Cricket – a 14-month-old, wire-haired pointer – ruining a pheasant hunt and killing a neighbour’s chickens.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket tried to bite her, proving herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” says Noem, “I realised I had to put her down.”

The governor describes taking Cricket to a gravel pit and killing her – then deciding to mete out the same fate to the unruly, uncastrated goat. The second killing took two shots, says Noem, adding that when it was all over her daughter Kennedy came home from school and asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

Kennedy Noem is now 27 years old, making her, by the governor’s statement, just seven at the time of her mother’s decision to shoot Cricket and the unnamed goat.

Amid widespread disbelief that a contender to be selected as Donald Trump’s running mate would commit such a tale to paper, many observers deemed Noem’s hopes of national office as dead as Cricket and the unnamed goat.

Noem defended her story on Friday, saying it