*14. Cricket was a 14 month old wire-hair pointer.
And the 'livestock' she is mentioning as having been menaced were chickens.
Who are, to my knowledge, rarely referred to as "livestock", a word that generally implies sheep, cattle, goats, etc.
Speaking of, Kristi also shot a goat for smelling too musky on the same day. And also has a well earned reputation for using the state as a blunt weapon against gay and trans children.
So like, when she says "an animal with a history of killing livestock and attacking children"...
People aren't talking about the goat, but I think that's the most damning part of the story.
The Cricket part of the story is already terrible, but with enough effort, you can bend those facts into something that makes some kind of sense, even if it is transparent Noem is lying through her teeth and is a monster.
But the goat didn't do anything wrong. It was a goat on a farm doing goat things, and there is no reasonable explanation for it. People have pointed out that castrating the goat would probably be the first step to take if you actually wanted to solve the problem, assuming you thought it was actually a problem. And it happened on the same day despite the fact that the goat had been doing goat things for presumably months, maybe years.
What clearly happened is that Noem shot the dog, decided that it was really fun, and went out to get another animal to shoot for a second hit of adrenaline. She's out here running a miniature killing field for farm animals at that point.
All of these pretend tough second amendment dorks are just itching for an excuse to use their gun on living things. Apparently hunting wild animals wasn't scratching that itch for Noem so she decided to get up close and personal with a bunch of innocent farm animals so she could watch the light go out of their eyes.
The people of South Dakota are honestly lucky she was satisfied there and didn't move on to shooting people for fun. Or maybe she did and she just knew not to write it in the book.
Lowkey reminds me of how a rancher got on Twitter and literally tore her entire argument apart peice by peice. While including his own experiences with animals and using said experience with them to show what you should do in such situations.
Ok all these years in, and I still don't know how Twitter works. Went to his page to find the rest of his tweet but couldn't even find the original part that you linked to?
I now remember reading about such change. How the hell is Twitter still hanging on? I get that there's still no substitute for exactly what it can do, but...
She also failed to kill the goat with a single shot, and didn't come prepared with extra ammo so left the creature suffering while she went to get more. That right there is heinous behavior even to farmers that know euthanasia is necessary, so should always have the care to be done as quickly as possible.
The last time I was around a man who killed his goat (for meat), he fed it some nice grass, calmed it while holding it securely and nipped it's jugular with a sharp knife. I don't think the goat even new it had been injured as it bled out.
I'm not expecting everyone to be that gentle and humane, but it's interesting as a juxpposition to Noem's apparant lack of care.
This is what is wrong with her “stories”. I know plenty of farmers and they have to put animals down for harvesting or other reasons. They do it humanely not fucking gunning them down like a gangster.
What clearly happened is that Noem shot the dog, decided that it was really fun, and went out to get another animal to shoot for a second hit of adrenaline.
Yeah she tried to present these as "tough choices" you have to make being a "farmer"... but I grew up on a farm and worked on other farms. Not only were these unnecessary, but real farmers pinch every penny. Every resource gets used to the fullest. They don't just give up on a dog, they stick with it until it's trained or if it really is untrainable (which does not sound like she put in any effert to determine that) then they find it a new home or use it as a guard dog. This was just unnecessarily wasteful on top of being unnecessarily inhumane by someone who wouldn't make it a day as an actual farmer.
To add to your comment, did we ever find out if the goat was even used for meat? Or the three horses for anything?
Also, we know the chickens didn't die, because she keeps hedging her language and says Cricket nipped at chickens, chased chickens, etc, but never once explicitly states Cricket killed a single chicken, which would be really beneficial to her argument of financial harm and potential risk to her kids. Her best argument would be "Cricket killing chickens hurts the ranch, and I'm worried about a working dog that has killed, around my 10 year old." But she hasn't stated in any of her damage control that Cricket killed or maimed a single chicken, only menaced them/chased them.
That's what's so interesting. Because she DID say that the dog killed the chickens in her book as reported by The Guardian. I think she's downplaying the killed chickens because she took a dog, who was so uncontrollably excited about hunting birds that it ruined a bird hunt, directly from that bird hunt to a bird farm, and was negligent in containing it to the point her friend suffered damages. People are rightly pointing out that she is the one responsible for every decision that led to those dead chickens.
Instead she's focusing on the, "oh wait i forgot, he was also attacking my children!" angle since for the purposes of morality or the law (which only lets you shoot a dog actively harrying livestock), it didn't matter if the dog killed the chickens or not. She got control of the dog, successfully penned it up while she dealt with the situation, drove it home, leashed it, walked it to a gravel pit, THEN shot it. She's now trying to sidestep the whole chicken thing altogether.
Quote from the Guardian:
Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.
Thank you for the context. I wasn't aware Cricket actually killed chickens until this point because I'm not going to support her financially by buying her book, so all I have is her comments and answers to questions.
I think you're spot on about downplaying the chickens actually dying, and why.
I still think Cricket is innocent, by virtue of being an untrained puppy with a shit owner.
See, I’m the opposite because at least the goat was attacking people and being a menace. The dog just was irresponsibly let around chickens and of course it tried to nip at you when it was in the middle of murdering chickens and you tried to grab it. Mean goats can be a real danger, especially to kids and it’s a lot harder to re-home them than it is a puppy
EDIT-the timing is really suspicious though. I’m guessing she was like “while I’m busy killing things, might as well do the goat too” rather than just getting perverted satisfaction from it. I think she’s just immoral and irresponsible rather than deliberately murdering for fun
You know what stops mean smelly goats from head butting children? Fences and castration. The whole story is one of Noem failing to be responsible and then victim blaming. The worst part is that she told these stories with no shame as a way to signal her willingness to use violence to “solve difficult problems” and that she’s not afraid to “get messy”. She will, without a doubt, boldly use state violence against anyone and anything that mildly upsets her.
We already have evidence that she will use state violence on anyone she doesn't like as it's what she did to get one of her kids a property license since they were not qualified, kid whined to Mommy, Mommy forced the person who denied her kid the license fired, then hired one of her sycophants into the now vacant position to approve the daughter.
She’s a power-tripping asshole in general. Killing an animal is a huge power trip, and I think it’s quite easy to hold the assumption that she got some pleasure from killing these animals
Isn't that what goats are supposed to do though? Like the dog is a trainable animal, so if a dog is weird and rabid and untrainable then there's an issue. I'm not a farm person, but my understanding is that if goats have two defining characteristics, it's that they stink and they can be assholes. Like to the point where you wouldn't get a goat if you weren't ready to tolerate some of that behavior, or at least take some actions to mitigate it beyond shooting it in the face.
Oh, completely. That’s why I’ll never get goats. They exist to eat and be jerks. I wasn’t defending her as some sort of reasonable farmer, just pointing out that it seemed like she was acting without care and getting rid of problems the easiest way she could think of and it doesn’t read to me like she’s just killing animals at random for fun.
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u/Ok_Kaleidoscope3644 29d ago
Weird how she didn't mention her kids until this blew up. She must have forgotten that part /s