Potential Trump VP Pick Brags That She Murdered a Puppy She Hated

Donald Trump’s shortlist for his running mate is full of the right wing’s worst political stars—aside from himself, that is. But reported vice presidential hopeful Kristi Noem has one skeleton in her closet—er, in the woods—that will not be helpful in the polls.

The South Dakota governor admits to deliberately killing her 14-month-old pet dog Cricket in her upcoming book No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, reported The Guardian, which obtained an advance copy of the book, on Friday. The book is due out next month.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, calling her “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog.”

After repeated failed attempts to train Cricket as a hunting dog, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Cricket mauled a family’s chickens when Noem stopped at their house following a pheasant hunt.

Cricket had escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

Noem wrote that she repeatedly apologized, wrote the family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.”

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

Noem recalls getting her gun and leading Cricket to a gravel pit before executing her.

Critics were quick to point out that the fault was not with Cricket, but with Noem herself. A 14-month-old dog is a “baby that doesn’t know any better,” Dan Lussen, a professional hunting dog trainer, told Rolling Stone.

“To me, it’s a lack of guidance by the owner, or training by the owner, or discipline by the owner,” he said, explaining that training a young hunting dog is a lengthy and slow process. “There’s a lot of steps that you take before you take it to a field and shoot birds over it.”

Noem’s record as governor of South Dakota isn’t clean, either. Several Native tribes in the state have banned her from their reservations over her racist assertions that Natives in the state work with drug cartels and neglect their children. Plus, Noem’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a high number of cases in the state, and she tried to prevent Native tribes from implementing their own Covid safety measures.

Her attitude towards canines may not put her in Trump’s VP doghouse, though. He has repeatedly called his opponents dogs as an insult, mentioned on multiple occasions about how much he doesn’t like them, and famously avoided having a pet dog as president because he said it “feels a little phony to me.”