From the desk of… Kristi Noem's sad tail…er, tale

Probably by the time this column appears in print, Donald Trump will have made some sort of tone-deaf remark about his would-be running mate’s bizarre story about executing the family dog with a shotgun. As near as I can tell, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s qualifications for the job began and ended with her being eager to parrot MAGA catchphrases anyway. So, it’s no big loss.

I use the past tense because she’s finished. Her career is over. To me, the most remarkable thing about the entire affair is that Noem appears not to have understood that she had basically written a political suicide note. There’s definitely something missing from her emotional tool kit.

Meghan McCain summed things up succinctly on X: “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc. — but not from killing a dog. All I will distinctly think about Kristi Noem now is that she murdered a puppy who was ‘acting up’ which is obviously cruel and insane.”

Noem presents the tale as an example of her tough-minded ability to make hard choices and do something “difficult, messy and ugly” that simply must be done. Stung by criticism from soft-handed city folk who read a pre-publication account in The Guardian, she played the South Dakota rancher card.

“We love animals,” she said, “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.”

Been there, done that. But I hated every minute of it. Putting down gravely ill or injured animals is a sad reality of life on a ranch or farm — a brutal, shocking business. My neighbor brought over his backhoe, dug a grave and offered to finish the job for me. But I thought it was my personal duty. I learned that there is nothing quite so dead as a dead horse. A gentle, sweet-natured horse named Lucky that I used to love.

Problem is, Noem appears to have rather enjoyed herself. So much so that she followed up shooting a misbehaving young bird dog with executing a rambunctious pet goat that ought to have been gelded in the first place.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes of Cricket, the ill-fated wire-haired retriever. At 14 months old, the dog was basically still a puppy, and according to her owner, an “untrainable” mess, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”

According to the governor, she took Cricket along on a pheasant hunting trip with older dogs, hoping they’d teach her something. Instead, the puppy ran wild, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

Noem tried to bring the dog under control with an electronic shocking collar — which, unless she’s an experienced dog-trainer, was certain to backfire. (Actually, no real trainer would attempt such a thing. But some people imagine that they can hurt or frighten a dog into behaving.)

Then on the way home, Noem stopped to visit a family with a yard full of chickens. She failed to secure Cricket, who went wild at the sight of the birds, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” When she tried to restrain the dog, Cricket snapped at her.

That did it. Writing a check to her horrified friends for the dead chickens, the governor decided that Cricket had to die. She led the family dog to a gravel pit near her home and shot her in the face. Then she decided to finish off the unruly goat that she says bullied her children. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”

No, it did not.

It’s basically Noem’s own damn fault. A responsible dog owner would have prevented an excitable young bird dog from getting anywhere near those chickens.

But who am I to talk? The best dog I’ve ever owned — a Great Pyrenees named Jesse who loved and protected us country and city, for 16 years — killed a bunch of another neighbor’s prize chickens at about Cricket’s age.

I, too, paid for the birds, and the neighbor, also a dog lover, decided that “free-range” chickens weren’t an option with all the coyotes, coons, hawks, eagles and farm dogs down our road.

Between us, we fixed things so it never happened again. You know, like adults and friends.

A compassionate person would have found Cricket a new home — or even surrendered her to a shelter. But Noem hated her, and she’s the kind of person who brags about shooting a goat.

No wonder she and Trump were allies.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at [email protected].