Woman who shot her dog will head US Homeland Security

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to serve as the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing two sources. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to disaster response and the U.S. Secret Service. The post is equivalent to that of the home minister in India.

Noem, once seen as a possible running mate for Trump, is currently serving her second four-year term as South Dakota's governor after a landslide re-election victory in 2022. She rose to national prominence after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Noem faced a period of political turbulence earlier this year.


When Noem shot her dog
Noem faced widespread backlash in April this year when she wrote in a memoir that she shot to death an "untrainable" dog that she "hated" on her family farm, following which some Trump advisers said they believed that Noem's stock had fallen in the former president's eyes at the time when she was still a VP contender.

“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor wrote in her book “No Going Back”, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.

She included her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she said, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem said, she hoped to calm the young dog down and began to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.

Noem described calling Cricket and attempting to use an electronic collar to bring her under control, but nothing worked. Later, on the way home after the hunt, Noem stopped to speak with a local family. While he was talking to them, Cricket escaped from the truck and attacked the family’s chickens, "grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with a single bite, then dropping it to attack another."

Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem wrote, behaved like “a trained assassin”.

When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she said, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.

Through it all, Noem said, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem said, “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

And then the goat
Her family, Noem wrote, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. She said she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.

At that point, Noem said, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. “The startled workers swiftly got back to work, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.”

Noem denies charges?
After facing backlash for her shootings, Noem in an interview with Fox News said “You know how the fake news works”. “They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it. And that’s what’s happened in this case.”

She said, “The truth of the story is that this was a working dog and it was not a puppy. It was a dog that was extremely dangerous.”

These controversies surrounding the incident with the dog and the goat shooting damaged her prospects of running for Vice President. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally, said, “Killing the dog and then writing about it ended any possibility of her being picked as VP”, as per a Politico report.