Okay, I was just worried that a thread on the general topic might get derailed in a political one because of this incident.
I think if it were phrased as “this Noem incident got me wondering…” and specified it’s a general query, not to further pursue the political/scandalous aspects, it would survive, especially with the mods who are good at keeping non-Pit threads on track.
I think a fair amount is that it was her daughter’s dog.
That Noem killed, apparently callously and with no regard to her daughter’s interest.
Part of it was the gratuituous “I hated that dog” thing — makes it come across not as a tough decision reluctantly taken of necessity, but as something she was looking for an excuse to do.
And another big part of it is the implicit (and afterward, explicit) “I know this will disturb some of you soft snowflakes, sorry not sorry” angle.
Back in PR we enjoy cabrito en fricasé.
OK thanks, I think I’m starting to understand
Certainly true but even if you take her daughter out of the equation it is still a colossally shitty thing to do. The daughter just makes a bad thing worse. As I read the account I was thinking, “WTF is wrong with this person?” Then comes the gut-punch at the end with her daughter coming home from school and looking for her dog who is dead and bloody in a ditch nearby, cruelly shot by her mother.
We’ve been at this days now and it still angers me.
The Trumpiest normal-seeming people I know are the woman I used to work most closely with and neighbors from the next block. Both my former coworker and the neighbors rescue animals, they’ll all go to some kind of ridiculous lengths to rehabilitate them, and although I’m definitely not going to bring up politics with them (I put up my Biden yard sign and the neighbors put up their Trump one…and a giant flag, at least before 1/6/21; the coworker and I came to an understanding that we wouldn’t come to any agreement early on), I know that all of them would be outraged.
The reason they can be callous about people is that they believe in Personal Responsibility and that anything that happens to someone they don’t personally know is due to that person’s choices. They may feel bad for any children involved, but those children are their parents’ responsibility. There’s no such thing as society, as Thatcher said (they may not know much about her, since she’s not American, but they’d love her if they did).
I think the thing that would sink Noem is that she’s not Trump. If this was a story about something he had done, the above true believers might well find some way to get over their cognitive dissonance and justify it. But some lady politician? Not likely. And Trump, for all his failings, knows his true believers. He’s thrown plenty of others under the bus; there’s no reason to he’d stick his neck out for Noem.
I’m pretty sure I could do it. Not on a daily basis, but when there is need. I’ve held the hand of dying loved ones as they’ve taken their last breath. It’s very sad, and yet, as the last good thing you can do for someone, it is bearable.
To add… sometimes putting a dog down is a sad necessity. There are accepted ways of doing this.
It is not a necessity to shoot a dog in the face with a shotgun because you “hated it”
He has a neck?
It looks to me like double chins (multiple) all the way down to his flabby breasts.
Yeah, four things:
- i take no responsibility for failing to train the dog
- i hated it, so i killed it
- i killed it in a needlessly cruel way
- i did it without warning my kid, who was close to the dog
Oh, and a fifth
5) I’m proud of doing this and bragging about it.
I don’t have a problem with rural people killing animals. I eat meat, i know where it comes from. I set traps for mice, i even killed some rodents directly when i worked in a medical lab in my youth. But all the bad things the dog did were things she could have prevented. The goat was literally just being a billy goat. (It smelled bad! No shit.) She just seems to be reveling in needless cruelty.
I’ve done that for three of my dogs, It tears my heart out, but I know it’s better for them to have me holding and cuddling them. Damn. Now, I’m going to cry.
Also it’s a really big deal in the hunting community to have as humane a “harvest” as possible. Ideally a clean heart/lung shot with an appropriate caliber weapon. People who spray and pray or worse who just take the trophy mount and waste the meat are reviled by the vast majority.
Praise to both of you, for coming together for the sake of the dog whatever your troubles with each other.
Both are part of it for me, but I’ll add to that:
The attack on the chickens was her fault, not the dog’s. A high percentage of dogs will attack chickens if they get the chance – unless they’ve been taught not to do that. If you haven’t trained your dog to be safe around chickens, then you make sure not to let your dog loose around chickens. For some city folks doing so can be ignorance – but she’s claiming to be country folk; so she should know that.
Don’t declare a dog untrainable because you’re terrible at training dogs. Find somebody who can train dogs to give the dog to.
For another – I haven’t read her description of killing the goat, only the second hand ones in this thread; but it reads to me that she doesn’t know how to kill an animal. If you don’t know how to kill an animal – either don’t do it at all (if it’s really necessary, get somebody who knows how to do it), or find someone who does know how to walk you through every bit of the process, and listen to them, and obey their instructions. Do not just go around killing animals anyway, without bothering to learn how. Maybe (I hope) the dog died instantly anyway – but if so, that was luck, not knowledge.
But but but… what if the goat was smelly and you really didn’t like it because it did not play nicely with the children? Then it’s OK to shoot it in the face with a shotgun right? < s >
Even for people who aren’t that concerned with animal suffering, a “clean” kill - one that drops the animal and ends its life as quickly as possible - is a hell of a lot less work than chasing after a wounded game animal, and safer for domestic animals being slaughtered because a wounded, terrified animal is capable of hurting you - or trying to run away, at which point you have to chase after it.
Having to leave an animal wounded and go back to your truck to get more ammo is very poor form for nearly every farmer and hunter I’ve ever met.
It’s pretty clear that the dog was not attacking people. There’s a brief mention of that in the version of the story in the book, but that’s a late addition to the story, and she never mentioned it in the earlier tellings. In other words, she’s lying to try to justify her actions.
What the dog was doing was killing birds. Which was exactly what she was training it to do. So the bit about the dog being untrainable was also a lie.
Wouldn’t it be a nice thing if she was bound to prove how much instruction she herself provided that 14 month old pup? Untrainable my ass. What an evil person she is.
Don’t forget Cricket was “having the time of her life,” jumping around like a puppy on a hunting excursion, instead of being all steely-eyed and deadly. If that doesn’t call for summary execution, I don’t know what does.
I’m sure in future editions of the book, we’ll be told Cricket was teaching critical race theory.