Trump VP candidate Kristi Noem makes shocking admission she shot pet dog she ‘hated’

One of the candidates in the running to be Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President has admitted that she once shot a pet puppy that she “hated”.

Kristi Noem wrote about an incident with the dog, named Cricket, who she called “untrainable” and “less than worthless”. She also claimed to have put down an unnamed, family-owned goat because he was “nasty and mean”.

Ms Noem, the Governor of South Dakota is seen as a leading contender to be Mr Trump’s running mate for the November presidential election.

Her revelations about killing animals sparked outrage on Friday, with some describing her as “sick and twisted” and “trash”.

Her anecdotes appear in her new book No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – which will be published in the US next month. A copy has been obtained ahead of time by The Guardian.

The outlet reported that in the book, Ms Noem – who represented South Dakota in Congress for eight years before becoming governor – includes the story of Cricket’s demise in order to illustrate how to do things in life, both personally and politically, which are “difficult, messy and ugly”.

The governor describes how she took the puppy on a pheasant hunt with other dogs to teach her how to behave. However, she said the animal 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”. Cricket also later attempted to bite the governor herself, she writes.

In the book Ms Noem wrote a check for the damage to the owners of the chickens, who were weeping,