Kristi Noem, Bad Dogs, and Luxury Beliefs

Her story was awful. But are her haters hypocrites?

Photo by Ajeet Panesar on Unsplash

Some years ago, I sat in the waiting room of a veterinary clinic and tried to convince a woman to put her dog down. It was actually her teenage son trying to do most of the convincing, with a couple of other patrons gently backing him up. It’s among the most delicate matters you can broach with another human, the question of whether and when to end the suffering of a non-human companion. I was treading lightly, but I was seething inside. The dog was a quivering mass of bones and patchy fur. With every step, his hind legs slid out from under him; cysts protruded from beneath his skin. He was probably ten or twelve years old. He was clearly deeply loved by his family; perhaps too deeply loved, though in that moment, I would have argued not loved enough.

“Come on, Ma,” the boy said in a light Spanish accent. “It’s not fair to him. It’s the kind thing to do.”

“I can’t do it,” the woman said. Her accent was thicker. She was sobbing into a tissue.

“I can tell how much he’s loved,” I volunteered. “Part of our job of loving them is to end their suffering. It’s the worst part, but it’s so important.”

“No,” she said.

“Ma, what if you were in the hospital being kept alive by machines?” the boy said. “Would you want us to just keep you on them?”

“Yes!” she said. “I would want to stay alive!”

The boy was near tears but managed a faint laugh. “Come on, Ma.”

“You’re not pulling the plug on me!”

I was about to say something else, when my dog Phoebe and I were called in for our appointment. In the exam room, I asked the vet why she couldn’t just insist to the woman that it was time to put the dog down.

“We’ve been trying to convince her for months,” the vet said. “She won’t listen.”

In recent weeks, the why-is-this-news cycle has been thrashing over an anecdote in the recently released memoir by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. In what is surely among the most ill-advised passages in recent literature, Noem described the circumstances under which she was forced to do the “unpleasant job” of killing her dog Cricket with a shotgun. I won’t rehash all the details here, since you’ve probably either read them or actively avoided them. But suffice it to say the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer not only had no instinct for its designated job of pheasant hunting but also killed a neighbor’s chickens “like a trained assassin.” In Noem’s description, Cricket “grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”