“Puppy killer” is not usually offered as a qualification for high elective office.
It’s a self-inflicted wound - the audition by South Dakota governor and farmer Kristi Noem as a MAGA candidate for vice president on Donald Trump’s ticket – choosing to publicize in a forthcoming campaign biography the story that she summarily executed a 14-month-old pointer puppy.
As reported, Noem shot Cricket the puppy for its “aggressive personality,” disrupting a pheasant hunt and getting loose to attack her neighbors’ chickens. Showing neither mercy nor comprehension of a young dog’s behavior, Noem writes, “I hated that dog,” which to her was “untrainable, dangerous to anyone she came in contract with, and less than worthless…as a hunting dog.”
My credentials for the right to comment: I was born and raised in a farm village on Iowa’s black dirt prairie, one hour from the South Dakota border. My father was a large-animal veterinarian whose clients lived on the county’s family farms, raising the plant and animal crops that supported the post-war prosperity.
Farm life now as then is demanding, with little room for naïve romance or misplaced sentimentality. Which does not, however, justify or require the hardening of hearts or the constriction of feelings – my own experience was to the contrary.
Not only is Noem’s story repugnant, it goes from bad to worse. It is to honor the needless sacrifice of Cricket the puppy that Noem’s pathetic attempt to rationalize an impetuous execution is, as was spoken back in the country, “the dog that won’t hunt.”
The idea is offensive that Cricket deserved execution in a gravel pit, either for its supposed failure at a pheasant “hunt” or for biting a family member. To start, readily agree that a farm dog may well have a guard function – watchful for both predators threatening the livestock and strangers with unproved intent. If so, the farmer is responsible that a canine with ancestral lupine DNA be leashed or penned where it can protect its charges without itself being a hazard.
Further, any dog grown and large enough to inflict damage should be answerable to a “one bite rule,” whether a ranch-raised mongrel or an over-bred Doberman in an ill-suited city apartment, so the failure to secure the young puppy falls on Noem herself.
Nor does Noem’s story improve. In my youth, hunting was done less for sport than to determine the quality of protein on the supper table, and safe and effective use of firearms was basic in every household.
By contrast to the context for Cricket’s youthful exuberance, bird hunting in the mid-20th century meant a real contest between man and prey: could a wily pheasant taking cover in a farm grove or a roadside ditch be flushed by a hunter on foot with the help of his dog? Instead, today’s dubious “hunts” involve the pre-dawn planting of sleeping birds in the predetermined landscape of a high-ticket resort or gun club, only to be target practice for the shooters - degraded slaughter, not fit to qualify as “sport.”
Noem amplifies her distressing behavior with two additions – first, that she also killed in the same gravel pit an unnamed but rambunctious male goat, deemed guilty of chasing her children and smelling “disgusting, musky, rancid” – and second, putting emphasis on the supposed vigor with which she would confront “difficult, messy and ugly” conditions, as in recent weeks she had been obliged to destroy three elderly horses.
My skepticism level is elevated. Modifying the observation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell about parents, that while putting down a single horse may be a misfortune, to kill three may suggest a convenient and systematic cull in the Noem stables.
I grew up steeped in the ethics of animal husbandry: putting down an animal for humane reasons was a painful if necessary part of farm life, done with restraint and respect. There was such emotion that my father and his veterinarian colleagues in our quadrant of the state shared an on-call reciprocal readiness to euthanize each other’s dogs, to mitigate and relieve the intensity of the feelings involved.
How will Noem’s performative display go down? For the broader population, the callous mentality that could conceive a farmstead policy - “this week let’s kill the three old horses”– disqualifies her from any proximity to the complexity of society’s complex problems.
As for her presumptive one-man audience, the reaction of Donald Trump awaits, although any sense of optimism should be measured. Between his urban residences in mid-town Manhattan and Florida, the narrow range of his knowledge and competence, and his amply displayed lack of empathy or sensitivity, he lacks any qualifications to speak to a farmer’s decision-making. If he ever played fetch with a puppy or taught one to heel or stay, it fails to show in the published catalogs of his aggrandizement. It would confound him to tell hay from straw, or to assess the range of shotgun gauges, and he would well assume that a “branding iron” refers to a gold-painted golf club inscribed with his monogram and offered for sale to the faithful in one of his courses’ pro shops.
Meanwhile Trump is reported to be one of only four American presidents not to have a dog. Harry Truman’s maxim, that a president in search of a friend in Washington should have a dog, is thereby reversed – the absence of a White House pet in the Trump years may be taken as indicative of his lack of friends of any type.
Rejecting the investment of time and energy to bring Cricket from its under-trained and over-energized puppyhood to maturity as a hunting dog, or to find a suitable and loving home where its lack of field aptitude was irrelevant, Noem’s fatal choice suffices in its lack of empathy and judgment not just to confirm her antipathy for the needy and less fortunate but to see her removed and excluded from the political discourse.
Cruel and stupid behaviors are not specific to cultures or geography, of course. Animal abusers can as well be found in the cities and the suburbs as on farms and ranches, and claims of virtue should be assessed with care. Desirably, however, Kristi Noem’s self-proclaimed pattern toward the animals under her care should be kept firmly secured behind the closed gates of her South Dakota farm – thus confining to her family and her livestock her ability to inflict the consequences of her barbarities.
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