OPINION: There’s been a lot of talk about Kristi Noem recently because she shot her young dog in a gravel pit on her farm because she considered the dog to be useless as a hunting dog and by all accounts was very irritated with Cricket’s behaviour. She didn’t consider retraining him or rehoming him. It seems her first thought was to shoot him dead. A mentality which is diametrically opposite to considerations of animal welfare but of course she would strongly deny that saying that sometimes you have to make tough decisions with respect to companion animals.
Most people would disagree, I’d suggest, with her behaviour now an insurmountable barrier to her becoming the vice president to Donald Trump when he is elected president of the United States for the second time, which seems likely at present despite his plethora of criminal and civil court cases which are bogging him down and preventing him from campaigning.
In an interesting sideshow, Kristi Noem has suggested that President Biden’s German Shepherd, Commander, should have been shot rather than taken out of the White House because he bit Secret Service agents on at least 24 occasions according to all the reports.
But the problem here was probably not the dog’s but the president’s. He brought a German shepherd into the White House and German shepherds are very protective of their owners. The White House would have been a confusing place with lots of people milling around and it seems to me that this dog saw strangers as threats to President Biden, his owner. He therefore nipped them on occasions. They weren’t serious bites although I recall that one agent went to hospital for treatment.
As mentioned, the problem was not the dog but the man and the cure was to take him out of the White House which is what happened; not to shoot the dog for behaving naturally. Kristi Noem’s suggestion indicates a terrible lack of sensitivity towards animal welfare.
Kristi Noem is the Republican governor of South Dakota. She made the suggestion in her well-publicised book No Going Back. It she wrote, “What would I do if I was president on the first day in office in 2025? Thanks for asking. I happen to have a list. The first thing I’d do is to make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds (“Commander, say hello to Cricket for me”).”
In that suggestion she is stating that Commander would be meeting the dog that she shot and is now over the rainbow bridge in dog heaven.
She defended her comments about Commander in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation programme yesterday, according to The Times report of today.
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So, how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it?”
The host of the program asked whether she was suggesting that the dog should have been shot. In response Kristi Noem said: “That’s what the president should be accountable to”. Thereby confirming that she thought the dog should have been shot.
The viral story of Kristi Noem’s shooting of Cricket has damaged their chances of being VP to Donald Trump which for animal advocates is a good result because as mentioned above this duo would be a disaster for both animal welfare and wildlife conservation.
Trump is not the type of person to be concerned about animal welfare. He is more concerned about the economy and building businesses which is important but he would do it at the expense of wildlife conservation. And his sons like to go sport hunting and trophy hunting in Africa and therefore I can only assume that he supports trophy hunting and sport hunting which to any normal person is obnoxious particularly in today’s world where wildlife is often critically endangered and certainly were African iconic species are endangered to various degrees.
Trump is one of the few presidents who has not had a pet at the White House and he is not considered a dog lover. He is certainly not a cat lover.
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However, on the bright side, he is said to have been baffled as to why no one would admit to shooting her dog. He asked, “Why would she do that? What is wrong with her?”
But he appears not to be questioning the shooting of the dog but the fact that Noem publicised it in her book. That’s the issue it seems for Trump. And the last note to make is that Noem did this in order to pre-empt criticism of her during her VP campaign. The idea was to stop it becoming a barrier to her becoming a running mate with Trump. It didn’t work; quite the opposite in fact.
