Noem’s dog murder was bad, but to really understand her, watch the goat Daily Montanan

Ever since Governor Kristi Noem made the barnyard massacre public, everyone has been focused on Cricket.

That is understandable. Cricket was a 14 month old dog. It’s easy to imagine her head sticking out the window of a pickup truck, hair and tongue blowing in the wind. Like many dogs, Cricket likely had a personality and other human-like qualities that we so often attribute to canine companions.

Noem shot Cricket on an unknown date years ago because he was bad at hunting pheasants and good at hunting chickens. The moral, Noem wrote, is that leaders address problems immediately. That makes her a “doer,” she claimed, not an “avoider.”

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

But if you’ll listen to me, let me tell you why Cricket’s fate is the wrong place to focus your attention.

If you really want to understand Kristi Noem, you have to consider the goat.

‘I spotted our goat’

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

“As I walked back to the yard, I saw our buck,” Noem wrote.

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

In the book, Noem tried to justify her quick decision to kill the goat, writing that he “liked to chase her children” and “knock them down and kick their ass,” leaving them “terrified.” The animal also had a ‘miserable smell’.

But apparently none of that was so big that anything could be done about it. Not until Noem got angry enough to kill a dog and decided she had to kill again.

Noem says 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 another grenade to finish the job,” she wrote.

She studiously avoided saying that she had wounded the goat with the first shot, but that is the implication.

‘Because I didn’t want him to suffer,’ she added – apparently experiencing her first pang of feeling after saying that killing the dog was not ‘pleasant’ – ‘I rushed back across the pasture to the pickup, grabbed another grenade and hurried back to the pickup. gravel pit, and put it down.”

The goat story not only reflects a disturbing lack of self-control, but also raises a legal question.

The crime of animal cruelty

Noem has defended the shooting of the dog, citing legal justification for her actions. She is likely referring 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, a threat or injurious to life, limb or property.” ”

Cricket was killing a neighbor’s chickens and “spinning around to bite Noem” when she intervened; therefore, by Noem’s logic, her murder of Cricket was legally defensible. Legally, she’s probably right.

But what about the goat?

Sure, it chased kids, punched them, and smelled unpleasant.

“So a goat,” Stephen Colbert said during his monologue Monday on “The Late Show,” speaking for everyone who has ever been around goats.

If these characteristics meet the legal definition of ‘dangerous, a threat or injurious to life, limb or property’, killing any goat would always be legally justified.

In reality, what Noem did to the goat—drag it to a gravel pit, tie it to a post, shoot it once, go away to get another grenade, and shoot it again—seems like a lot on the legal definition of animal cruelty. . That definition in South Dakota law reads: “the deliberate, willful, and malicious infliction of gross physical abuse upon an animal that causes prolonged pain, serious bodily injury, or results in the death of the animal.”

Unfortunately, cruelty to animals is a Class 6 felony, and such lower-class crimes have a seven-year statute of limitations in South Dakota. We don’t know exactly what year it was when Noem shot her dog and goat. She provided a clue in the book when she wrote that her children came home on the school bus on the day of the murders and one of them asked, “Where’s Cricket?” Noem did not say how she reacted, and all her children are now adults.

If it was more than seven years ago, the goat murder is probably not prosecuteable. But no amount of prosecution can do more damage to Noem’s reputation and career than she has already done to herself by writing about her animal bloodlust.

As Noem wrapped up her bloody story in the book, she wrote that being a leader is often “sloppy” and “ugly.”

That is certainly the case in her case.

This column was originally produced by the South Dakota Searchlight, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.