Kristi Noem, dogs, and me

I wanted to avoid writing about Kristi Noem. But over the past few days, a dozen people—mostly strangers—have emailed me about her. Somebody asked me about her at my book event in Brevard, NC, on Tuesday. And not one but two newsletters—one from The Atlantic and one from the Washington Post—mentioned us in the same breath. I’m the guy with the new dog book. So for the moment, and I hope it’s just a moment, she and I are leashed together.

If you don’t know why, congratulations on avoiding cable news for the past week. Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, writes in her upcoming memoir about one of her dogs—a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket. Cricket had killed a couple of the neighbors’ chickens and disrupted a pheasant hunt. Noem decided this meant Cricket was untrainable and dangerous. So she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her dead.

The other thing that now seems dead is Noem’s hopes of becoming Donald Trump’s pick for vice president. Republicans and Democrats alike slammed her for killing the dog instead of the other obvious options—actually taking it to a trainer, for example, or trying to find it another home, or even just dropping it off at a shelter. The rule of thumb is that a dog becomes an adult after a year, but there’s no real set point—it can be anywhere from six months to three years old, and the larger the dog, the later they mature. More than likely, Noem killed a puppy.

I grew up among country people. I’ve heard tell of a few Old Yeller situations where a dog got rabies or was badly injured and somebody decided the decent thing to do was take it out behind the barn. This is different. The way Noem tells it, Cricket sounds more like an inconvenience, a problem that could have been handled with a little thinking or effort but was more easily solved with a shotgun.

And that, I think, is why she told that story.

Adam Serwer of the New Yorker coined a phrase a few years ago to describe the philosophy of Trump and his most ardent supporters: The cruelty is the point. Voters choose candidates for various and complicated reasons. But for many of Trump’s biggest fans, part of his appeal is his willingness to hurt the less powerful and less fortunate—verbally or otherwise. It not only makes Trump and his diehards feel good, it makes them feel good together. It’s a bonding exercise. It’s a thrill to just blast away.

Noem, I think, tried to turn her dog story into an allegory for her political beliefs. She wanted people to think that she would deal with her opponents the way she dealt with Cricket. Just take them out to the gravel pit. Figuratively or literally.

My guess is that she thought her potential supporters, and maybe her potential boss, would applaud her heartlessness. They’d see her as vice-presidential timber, and maybe down the road, as someone who could handle the top job.

The problem is, her story is not just metaphorical. She shot a real dog.

And to tens of millions of Americans, across all political boundaries, dogs aren’t just tools to be disposed of when they’re no longer useful. They’re our housemates, our companions, our unofficial therapists, the ones who love us for exactly who we are.

We often cry harder when a dog dies than we do at the deaths of the people we love. There are a lot of complicated reasons for that. But there are moments in my book when someone has to say goodbye to a dog they have bonded with, and they’re just shattered. For Noem to just dispose of a dog, on such flimsy grounds, is the sign of an ice-cold heart.

I think Noem is correct that an ice-cold heart can be a selling point for her core constituency. Her miscalculation was the story she told to prove it. You can do a lot of terrible things and get cheered by certain hard-core conservatives in 2024 America. But you can’t kill a dog.

—TT