Noem’s Dog Killing Was Bad, But To Really Understand Her, Think About The Goat • NC Newsline

Ever since Gov. Kristi Noem revealed her farm shooting, everyone’s focus has been on cricket.

It’s understandable. Cricket was a 14 month old dog. It’s easy to imagine his head sticking out of a van window, his hair and tongue fluttering in the wind. Like many dogs, Cricket probably had a personality and other human qualities that we so often attribute to canine companions.

Noem shot and killed Cricket on an undisclosed date years ago because he was bad at pheasant hunting and good at chicken hunting. The moral, Noem writes, is that leaders solve problems immediately. This makes her a “doer,” she said, not an “avoider.”

Again, the focus on Cricket makes sense, as we can all see that Noem could have taken the dog to a shelter and given him another chance at life.

But if you listen carefully, I want to tell you why Cricket’s plight is not the right place to focus your attention.

If you really want to understand Kristi Noem, you need to think about the goat.

“I spotted our goat”

After Noem made the death march to the gravel pit on her farm, where she shot Cricket, she was apparently still in an uncontrollable rage.

“As I walked back into the yard, I spotted our goat,” Noem wrote.

The Nameless Goat’s only sin at that moment was being in Noem’s line of sight.

In the book, Noem attempted to justify her hasty decision to kill the goat by writing that she “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them over and hit them,” leaving them “terrified.” The animal also had a “miserable odor.”

But apparently none of that was a big enough problem to fix. Not until Noem was angry enough to kill a dog and decided she had to kill again.

Noem said she “dragged” the goat to the gravel pit, “tied him to a post” and shot him. But the goat jumped when she shot.

“My shot was off and I needed an extra shell to finish the job,” she wrote.

She carefully avoided saying that she had injured the goat with the first shot, but that was the implication.

“Not wanting him to suffer,” she added – apparently experiencing her first pang of regret, after declaring that killing the dog was not “pleasant” – “I hurried across the pasture up to the van, grabbed another shell, rushed to the gravel pit, and dropped it off.

The goat’s story not only reflects a worrying lack of self-control, but also raises a question of law.

The crime of animal cruelty

Noem defended shooting the dog, citing legal justification for her actions. It likely refers to a state law that exempts from the definition of animal cruelty “any reasonable action taken by a person for the destruction or control of an animal known to be dangerous, pose a threat, or carry harm to life, physical integrity or property.”

Cricket killed a neighbor’s chickens and “whipped to bite” Noem when she intervened; therefore, by Noem’s logic, Cricket’s murder was legally defensible. She’s probably right, legally speaking.

But what about the goat?

Of course, he chased the kids and hit them and smelled bad. “So, a goat,” Stephen Colbert deadpanned during his Monday monologue on “The Late Show,” speaking for everyone who has ever been around goats. If these characteristics meet the legal definition of “dangerous, threatening, or injurious to life, limb, or property,” killing a goat would still be legally justified.

In reality, what Noem did to the goat – dragged it to a gravel pit, tied it to a post, shot it once, went off to get another shell and shot it again – looks an awful lot like the legal definition cruelty towards animals. . That definition in South Dakota law is “intentionally, willfully, and maliciously inflicting serious physical harm on an animal that causes prolonged pain, causes serious physical injury, or results in the death of the animal.”

Alas, animal cruelty is a Class 6 felony, and lower-class crimes like that are subject to a seven-year statute of limitations in South Dakota. We don’t know exactly what year Noem killed her dog and goat. She gave a clue in the book when she wrote that her children came home on the school bus the day of the murders and one of them asked, “Where’s Cricket?” Noem hasn’t said how she reacted, and all of her children are now adults.

If it was more than seven years ago, the goat killing probably wouldn’t be actionable. But no lawsuit could do more damage to Noem’s reputation and career than she already has by writing about her animalistic bloodlust.

As Noem finished her sob story in the book, she wrote that being a leader is often “messy” and “ugly.”

In his case, that is certainly the case.

This commentary was first published by South Dakota Searchlight.