cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/20120801
The Guardian obtained a copy of Noem’s soon-to-be released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” In it, she tells the story of the ill-fated Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she was training for pheasant hunting.
On the way home from the hunting trip, Noem writes that she stopped to talk to a family. Cricket got out of Noem’s truck and attacked and killed some of the family’s chickens, then bit the governor.
“At that moment,” Noem writes, “I realized I had to put her down.” She led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her.
She writes, according to the Guardian, that the tale was included to show her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it has to be done. But backlash was swift against the Republican governor, who just a month ago drew attention and criticism for posting an infomercial-like video about cosmetic dental surgery she received out-of-state.
If an animal has killed other people’s pets and attacked humans, I think that’s past the point of speculating about how you might possibly get it to not do those things in the future. More likely some half measures will be taken, that will fail, and it will happen again. I am biased but dogs that kill other pets should be put down as a matter of law.
Yeah, she grew up on a farm, animals are tools, yadda yadda yadda. I can accept that decisions sometimes have to be made that are not meant to be cruel. Here though, the fact that she made the call unilaterally, casually, and without considering other options that might have been available for a dog but not other “livestock.” She also stated that she “hated” the dog. Then, the way the article phrases it, it sounds like she got her blood up and decided that it was the day to do all her up close and personal killin’ and took out the goat she didn’t like. Oh, and let’s also not forget that her kids clearly liked the dog. This is what she decides add to her political bona fides.
There’s doing what has to be done, and then there’s seeming to get off on killing things that are less powerful than you but refuse to bend to your desires.
My childhood dog killed the family of rabbits in our backyard the first spring we had him. Should we have put him down then and there since he was clearly a killer? What about ky husky that kills ever opossum that she comes across? Dogs are predators and it takes training to keep their killer instincts under control, and even then you can inly do so much.
I think it is a little different if it is your own pets vs someone else’s. Why should the rest of community trust the judgment and ability of someone to retrain their dog after something like that, and their assurances that it won’t happen again?
If there’s a very high chance keeping a dog is going to result in violence being done to the people around you and their pets, maybe it shouldn’t be an option in the first place. Breeds of dogs with very high prey drives, ownership of them should probably be more restricted than it is.