Before a commercial publishing house sends a book off to print — especially a political memoir expected to create buzz and move copies in high volume — dozens of sets of eyes have looked over the manuscript.
The author — in this case the author and ghostwriter — her PR team, consultants, editors, fact-checkers, attorneys and test readers all have eyes on the text as they prepare it for the printers.
Thanks to Politico’s reporting, we now know several of those people — including the ghostwriter, the imprint’s editors and her own advisors — actively discouraged South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem from including an ugly anecdote about shooting a “problem” dog in her book, but Noem was insistent on using it. She thought the story would burnish her brand and appeal to rural voters, signaling that she’s a salt of the earth type who doesn’t balk at making hard decisions.
That was an epic miscalculation, and as the fallout continues with backlash from Americans across the political spectrum, it shows the days of thoughtless disregard for animals are over in the US, at least as far as public life goes.
As most people know by now, Noem wrote about how she shot a 14-month-old dog named Cricket on her family farm for “ruining a hunt” and going after a neighbor’s chickens. Cricket, Noem wrote, was “worthless as a hunting dog” because she got overly excited and went into sensory overload during a pheasant hunt that Noem wanted to be memorable for a group of guests.
“I hated that dog,” she says in the book, via her ghostwriter, before describing how she dragged the excited puppy out of her truck and into a gravel pit, then ended the Cricket’s 14-month-old life with a gunshot to the face.
In a series of disastrous interviews over the past week, Noem has tried to reframe the story as an example of the hateful “fake news” media digging for dirt on her, but not only did the South Dakota governor enthusiastically include the dog-killing story in her new book, she was so confident it would win her points that she used the story as a teaser in social media posts and other marketing for No Going Back. (It’s her second book and follows 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland. Noem really wants people to think she’s the embodiment of a Yellowstone character, a CrossFitting avatar of the real America.)
Noem thought she’d be hailed as the farm girl hero she wants to be, an image she’s cultivated during a political career that’s taken her from the state house to South Dakota’s lone congressional seat and, in 2019, the governor’s mansion.
I’ve spent my entire life in urban and suburban environs and I’ve essentially taken a Jainist attitude toward animal life. I’ve never hunted an animal and never will, so I’ll defer to longtime South Dakota scribe and hunter Kevin Woster, who thoughtfully writes about the experience of raising hunting dogs and the challenges it involves.
Woster believes Noem put a puppy in situations that would challenge even an experienced hunting dog, says the dog’s “shortcomings” were the fault of her owners, and thinks the dog could have had a long and happy life with a little patience and love. (It’s also worth pointing out that by killing chickens, the dog was doing precisely what Noem trained her to do. It’s not the dog’s fault Noem didn’t differentiate between the types of birds she wanted Cricket to attack.)
Other rural scribes have echoed those sentiments and pointed out that even on farms, being forced to kill an animal is a solemn and personal thing. Even if Noem had justification, it’s one thing to handle a regrettable situation and another thing entirely to choose to celebrate it in a memoir, even using it as a marketing teaser.
Politics is performative, and Noem isn’t alone in that respect. Here in New York our disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, speaks in a heavy New York accent that borders on parody. During the pandemic, he once interrupted Dr. Anthony Fauci to muse about how Fauci was the “Al Pacino of COVID” and Cuomo himself was the Robert DeNiro of the killer virus, then derailed an explainer on safety measures to wax poetic on the Italian bakeries of the Bronx’s Arthur Avenue and “the old neighborhood,” as if Cuomo grew up playing stickball on the street in Brooklyn instead of ping-ponging between New York, D.C. and Albany when his dad was a three-term governor.
George W. Bush, the scion of a generational political family and son of a former president, grew up in Connecticut. But he wanted the American public to see him as a cowboy, so he affected a Texas accent, peppered his speech with folksy-sounding nonsense and famously landed a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier to declare an end to the Iraq War on May 1, 2003, 18 years before the last US combat units left the country.
Politicians put on these costumes because voters respond to them. But the backlash against Noem — who’s now banned from 20 percent of the land in her own state and also in hot water for allegedly inventing anecdotes about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, French President Emmanuel Macron and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — proves that, like a prince choosing to don a Nazi uniform for Halloween, a politician’s choice of costume says a lot about her judgment and values. In this case even the people of America’s heartland, the voters Noem was condescending to with her book, were horrified by the ambitious governor’s callous disregard for animal life.
The fallout has apparently destroyed any chance that Noem could be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, and term limits mean the sun is setting on Noem’s time as a “public servant.” Good riddance.
Pain In The Bud 
Shows the total disregard all politicians have for anything but themsleves.. Here in the UK I joined the Animal welfare party a while ago. We achieved a good result in the “mayoral elections” – a general term for the manipulation that suits whatever media narrative is in place at the time. Hopefully this article and the continued backlash will destroy any “career” she hoped to have. my hope would be that other “politicians” (a bad insulting term in my book) learn from this but they don’t…
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She’s got nowhere to go, at least in the short term. She can’t run for governor again, both of her state’s senators are from her own party and aren’t going anywhere, and likewise South Dakota has only one congressional seat, also held by the GOP.
She’s got two more years left in her term as governor, but given the self-inflicted injuries and controversies back home (like Native Americans banning her from tribal lands), she’d need a serious image rehabilitation.
All that is subject to change, however, depending on what happens in November, but that’s a topic I don’t want to get into.
The encouraging thing is that people of all political persuasions were disgusted by the dog-killing anecdote, and a related goat-killing anecdote in the same chapter, and a lot of people from rural communities spoke up to say this is not who they are.
re: Animal Welfare Party: Those local and regional elections are a good start to build from. A lot of people dismiss local politics, but people at the municipal and county level oversee enormous budgets and arguably have the most impact on the daily lives of people.
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This pos would of been a great VP.After all that orange pos brings Holocaust deniers into his home and at rallies. Nick Fuentes. Ian Smith, etc. And endorses trash like Mark Robinson of North Carolina who calls gay and trans filth.
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I don’t know what to make of a world where Nick Fuentes has influence, and I’m sure the ex-governor of Rhodesia isn’t a man to be admired, but I do hope to keep this conversation centered on politics as it relates to animal welfare and public perception.
The reason is that I want everyone to feel welcome here regardless of political beliefs, and the ideological stuff is litigated endlessly all over the internet every day with plenty of sites welcoming that kind of discussion.
This is why I try to generally avoid politics, but I do think it’s important to talk about the confluence of animal welfare and politics when it has a bearing on the law or public opinion.
I hope you know I’m not criticizing you and I appreciate your contributions as one of PITB’s longest-time readers and commenters. If I could put it in simple terms, every day I open my browser and everything’s dominated by the Trump trial, polls, Idiocracy-style political rhetoric et al, and I think it’s important to have some spaces where we get a break from that.
Of course you’re all welcome to tell me I’m wrong or full of shit if you think that’s the case. 🙂
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This is the sort of person who embraces the old backwoods tradition of drowning unwanted kittens.
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Or throwing them out of moving cars, or leaving boxes of them in the cold in front of shelters, as if they’re objects instead of baby animals.
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My point is animal killers or Nazis. What is the difference?
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A bona-fide C**T if there ever was one. She’ll get hers – but it won’t be what she expects. BWAHAHAHAHA
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There is (or was) a YouTube channel called Upstate Canine Academy (now perhaps named Tom Davis) in which Tom Davis teaches clueless owners how to train their dogs.
His motto is “No Bad Dogs” and since I have believed that all my life, I happily have joined his No Bad Dogs Army.
Too bad this Noem person didn’t learn from him too.
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He’s absolutely right, in addition to the fact that cats and dogs mirror the personalities of the people they bond with. Although considering Bud’s uh, unique qualities, I’m not sure what that says about me…
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It takes a special kind of stupid – or hubris – or a potent stew of both to proudly assert that you murdered your ‘problem dog,’ a dog she didn’t even train. She certainly has the means to hire a professional dog trainer, and she didn’t even do that. What the hell was she expecting to happen??
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I noticed you submitted your comment three times. I’m sorry about that, I have moderation turned on so my readers don’t have to see comments from trolls who think it’s funny to post about how they shoot cats or poison them with antifreeze. Since I do post about animal welfare, animal protection laws and that sort of thing, the blog tends to get noticed by crazies who think they’re being clever.
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That was certainly a chilling admission; it’s good that so many were repulsed. I feel she miscalculated if she thought she’d impress rural voters. Though I was born in DC, I have a little familiarity with rural, as well as suburban, practices regarding animals. Maybe a subject to include in my second book. Lots of rescuers work in my present state full of agricultural land, coal mines, industry. I know the bad sorts exist, but my rural and small town raised husband makes extra treks around the house every day to be sure all ferals are fed. (Two newcomers she doesn’t like, and our Mom Groucho found a new campsite). He’s never hunted.
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