Republicans Slam Kristi Noem for Killing a Puppy

Republicans slammed South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem on social media on Friday after she reportedly wrote in her new book, which is set to be published next month, that she fatally shot her 14-month old dog Cricket after realizing it was “untrainable.”

British newspaper The Guardian published an excerpt of Noem’s book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward on Friday in which the governor shared an account of shooting the dog, which she wrote had an “aggressive personality.”

Noem wrote that she brought Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs to help it learn how to behave. However on the hunt, Cricket went “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” the governor wrote, who added that she used an electronic collar to attempt to bring Cricket under control, which didn’t work.

On the way home, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked a family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” This made the chickens’ owner cry and Noem paid them while also helping clean the mess the dog had made. She added that when she grabbed Cricket, the dog “whipped around to bite me.”

“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” she wrote, adding that she shot Cricket after leading it to a gravel pit.

The governor also wrote that she “hated that dog,” describing it as “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”

Newsweek has not obtained a copy of the book and has been unable to verify the reported passage. Newsweek has also reached out to a spokesperson for Noem’s office for comment via email.

The account sparked a wave of backlash on X, formerly Twitter, with several high-profile Republicans criticizing Noem who has been floated by some conservatives as a potential vice presidential pick for former President Donald Trump ahead of this year’s election.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as director of strategic communications in the Trump White House and now is a co-host of The View, wrote: “I’m a dog lover and I am honestly horrified by the Kristi Noem excerpt. I wish I hadn’t even read it. A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained. A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them.”

“Dogs are a gift from God. They’re a reflection of his unconditional love. Anyone who would needlessly hurt an animal because they are inconvenient needs help,” Griffin wrote in a separate post.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late GOP Senator John McCain, wrote, “What in the actual f***?!?”

“When I saw tweets about Kristi Noem murdering her puppy, I thought to myself, ‘Damn, one of the other VP contenders’ teams found some oppo,’ until I realized SHE wrote about it in HER book. I’m not sure why anyone would brag about this unless they’re sick and twisted,” Sarah Matthews who served as the deputy White House press secretary in the Trump administration, posted to X.

The Lincoln Project, a group comprised of anti-Trump Republicans, posted to X, “Kristi Noem can now add ‘puppy killer’ to her long resume of degenerate behavior. Everyday that there’s darkness permeating from MAGA world, we must fight it w/ the best weapon we have in our arsenal – optimism.”

Rick Wilson, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, wrote, “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit.”

Noem, meanwhile, responded to the criticism she has received in a post to X and wrote, “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.”