Like everyone else, I was surprised by the news that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem boasts in her forthcoming autobiography about shooting Cricket, her 14-months-old wirehair pointer, due to Cricket’s “aggressive personality”. Political commentators seem to think that she did this to show her toughness, with a particular eye, perhaps, to signalling to Donald Trump that she’d be a fine Vice Presidential candidate.
What surprised me more than the cruelty of the act — we’re talking about a modern Republican Governor after all — was that Noem seemed ignorant of the role of dogs in modern politics. Mitt Romney got pilloried for tying a dog on his car roof. Dr. Memhet Oz might be a Senator from Pennsylvania but for this video about his actually killing puppies:
And as I’ve noted before, in a 2008 Maryland Senate ad in the (ultimately losing) candidate tried to make fun of attack ads against him by invoking his love for … puppies.
It worked, though, for Senator Raphael Warnock,
…and it wasn’t even his dog.
Meanwhile, it turns out that shooting your dog might also be a class two misdemeanor in South Dakota.
In any case, what sort of politician thinks that the W.C. Fields crowd is a demographic worth pursuing?
And I think it probably will be Sen. Tim Scott, anyway.
Heck, even the Reagan and Bush I administrations knew better. Back in the 1980s (sort of overlapping administrations as I recall), there was a program for training military physicians on gunshot-wound care that involved, well, dogs as patients. When this filtered up to the SecDef’s office, it was promptly squashed with bloodcurdling threats† against anyone even thinking about reinstating it due to its “undoubted utility” or similar justifications, even when related to “animals that were going to be euthanized anyway and that we anesthetized before shooting.”
† Not entirely hyperbole.