Republicans hate dogs

Remember this story about Mitt Romney?

In June 2007 the Boston Globe reported that in 1983, current Republican presidential hopeful (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney had placed his Irish setter in a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to his parents’ cottage on the Canadian shores of

Lake Huron. He’d built a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog. He’d also made it clear to his five sons that bathroom breaks would be taken only during predetermined stops to gas up the car.

The dog spoiled this plan by letting loose with a bout of diarrhea during its rooftop sojourn, necessitating an unplanned gas station visit for the purpose of hosing down the pooch, its carrier, and the back of the car.

The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, says “Hold my beer.”

Noem reportedly writes in her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, that Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and that Noem hoped taking her on a pheasant hunt with older dogs would help to calm the young Cricket down. Instead, Noem writes that Cricket spoiled the hunt by being “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

The Republican reportedly writes that she failed to get Cricket under control with voice commands and an electronic collar, but then an even worse incident occurred after the hunt had ended. While traveling home, Noem writes that she stopped to speak to a local family—at which point Cricket escaped her truck and set about killing the family’s chickens, getting hold of one bird at a time, “crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

So what do you do with an out-of-control dog? Discipline? Find a professional trainer? Not this Republican!

Noem explains that she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “But it had to be done.” Afterward, she writes, she decided she also needed to kill a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, complaining that the buck “loved to chase” Noem’s children around and would wreck their clothes by knocking them down.

She reportedly writes of the goat that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” like Cricket, but the killing did not go as smoothly. The goat jumped when she pulled the trigger, Noem says, meaning the goat survived the shot. She adds that she went to her truck to get another shell and then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

What’s most surprising about this story is that she wrote it up and published it in a book for everyone to read, and doesn’t show even a glimmer of regret. I guess that’s what conservatives want, a politician who will kill without remorse.

Meanwhile, the Stevens Community Humane Society, our local no-kill shelter, is having their big annual fundraising dinner next Saturday. I’ll be there, come on by and support a group that doesn’t believe in clumsily gunning down animals we don’t like.