In so many words, Kristi Noem who is the Republican governor of South Dakota and a VP contender for Donald Trump if and when he becomes the next president, suggested that Biden, the current President, should have had his German Shepherd dog "Commander" shot rather than removed from the White House where records tell us that he bit Secret Service agents on at least 24 occasions and on one occasion the individual had to attend hospital as I recall.
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| Trump with Noem. This is a screenshot from a CBS video. |
So how did Noem make this suggestion? Well, she does it in her book and in a statement she made on an interview on CBC.
In her book, No Going Back, she writes: "What would I do on the first day in office in 2025? Thanks for asking. I happen to have a list. The first thing I'd do is make sure Joe Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds ('Commander, say hello to Cricket for me')." This means Commander meeting Cricket over the Rainbow Bridge in dog heaven.
You may remember that Cricket was the young dog that Kristi Noem shot in a gravel pit because he annoyed her in attacking chickens belonging to a local person with whom she was talking and because he was a 'useless' hunting dog in her words. She adopted the dog for hunting purposes. She likes to hunt which, for me, is another black mark against her.
She apparently didn't consider rehoming Cricket or retraining him. She just decided that she had to take tough measures and euthanise him. Well, shooting a dog is not euthanasia. It's plain killing. And it's painful. It is inflicting of a lot of pain on a dog albeit hopefully temporarily. So her method of dealing with troublesome dogs that she owns is to shoot them.
She also shot a goat who was troublesome to her and she had to do it twice because the first shot didn't kill the goat. And, further, she had to return to some stockpiled ammunition to reload her gun while the goat was in horrendous pain waiting for the coup de grace.
That's the kind of person she is. Secondly, she defended her comments in her book about Commander in an interview on CBS's Face the Nation programme yesterday. On that programme she said: "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?"
To that statement, the host of the show, Margaret Brennan, asked: "You're saying he should be shot?" In response Noem said: "That's what the President should be accountable to."
There you are. She didn't stated it in black-and-white on both occasions but on both occasions she strongly hinted that Biden should have shot his dog rather than do the more humane, more sensible and more decent thing which is to remove the dog from the White House where he was stressed because German shepherds are particularly defensive of their owner and Cricket was surrounded by a lot of people milling around the White House and so instinctively the dog protected the president by biting people invading on the president's territory. Entirely normal behaviour for which Kristi Noem would have shot the dog.
The chances of becoming vice president to trump are now pretty slim because of this story and because the world can see what kind of person she truly is. She is not a decent person that must be clear to everybody unless you think like her: that animals are second class citizens to be dealt with as possessions which is why she referred to the dog as "it".
One last point is worth making. Donald Trump questioned why Kristi Noem announced to the world that she had shot her dog Cricket. He thought that she should have kept quiet about it. But Kristi Noem wanted to announce it in her book in order to take pre-emptive measures vis-à-vis the public so that she couldn't be criticised for hiding the story from the public when it finally came out in the news media.
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