Her daughter, being a sane, healthy human being, had of course formed an emotional connection to the dog. Because that’s what sane, healthy human beings do. And the dog had likewise formed a close attachment to the girl, so close that he would meet her at the bus every day, so that the daughter would notice his absence. And Noem killed her daughter’s beloved pet without consulting her daughter or in any way preparing her for it. She’s not just cruel to animals, she’s torturing her own daughter.
Yeah I’m not being hyperbolic when I describe this as psychopathic behavior (and I get the theory that all successful politicians are sociopaths). I’m 100% sure that a person who did this would have no problem murdering a human for equally supurious reasons and feel absolutely no remorse about it.
Yeah if thia is the sympathetic telling of the story, that’s meant get out ahead of the negative story and set the narrative, what actually happened that could be worse?
I mean as described it’s basically the definition of hypothetical story that would be instantly disqualifying for any political campaign. Like “sure he got caught having an affair and falsifying campaign records to cover it up, but it’s not like he killed a puppy or anything”
Perhaps there is a simple explanation for why she is revealing the story that we are overlooking:
There were witnesses, a construction crew that watched her drag two fluffy animals to a gravel pit before executing them, as if she was trying to reenact a cut cartel execution scene from Zootopia.
Maybe she figured that as soon as she got fampus enough, someone out there would say, “Hey, didn’t I see that lady pop a cap in a puppy?” and the story would come out anyway.
Yeah but what could those witnesses say that could be worse than the story as she described it? The point of voluntarily bringing up something like this, from a PR point of view, is to allow you to present a sympathetic narrative based on a more positive telling of events than would come out otherwise. If this this the rose-tinted recollection of what happened, what is the more unpleasant telling?
Maybe she’s a serial puppy-killer who does this sort of thing routinely for her own sick enjoyment, and this is the one time there were witnesses. I’m only half-kidding.
Her kid was there, sobbing, and it was a reverese Old Yeller situation, where Noem yelled at her kid “He’s your dog, you do it!” while shoving the shotgun into her arms?
You certainly may be right but – Jesus. “Don’t hurt dogs” seems like such a basic political maxim. A couple years ago Greg Abbott vetoed a bill that would have outlawed tethering a dog outside without access to water, citing “muh freedum”. He rapidly reversed course when he realized the commercials this would generate and ended up passing it in a special session.
If I understand the timeline correctly, she dispatched the dog after it killed the chickens (something that birding dogs will often do if not trained and socialized not to do so), and then decided it was time to send the billy to its sweet hereafter because…her bloodlust was up?
As noted, farmers don’t tend to treat working or hunting dogs like ‘beloved pets’ to be pampered and kept inside (although experienced hunters will spend the time to train a dog because an untrained dog following its instincts is worse than useless) but they also don’t boast about killing them or other farm animals because they are smelly or obnoxious. This is a clearly a calculated account to make Noem sound tough and unrelenting in pursuit of her goals.
He could do it, too. He had nearly everybody fooled with that Hillbilly Elegy bullshit, and got to make the rounds on all the best mainstream media outlets as a counter-MAGA conservative before backflipping into a red hat while performing fascist hand signals, coming into a perfect dismount with right arm extended up, palm forward.
I’m in agreement with those who say there’s no political sensibility on display here. Noem didn’t figure out some clever strategy based on having a reputation as somebody who kills puppies. There’s no fourth-dimensional chess here. We need to realize that these people really are as stupid as they act.
I’ll add this; I’ve met a lot of genuine psychopaths and this is the way they behave. They don’t understand how abnormal their behavior is so they don’t bother concealing it. They’ll talk about the guy they murdered yesterday with the same casualness that you or I would have talking about the trip to the grocery store we made yesterday. (Of course the psychopaths I encountered were the ones who were caught and imprisoned. There’s probably another class of more functional psychopaths who manage to stay undetected.)
I just don’t think so. As @Spoons pointed out, there are certainly people of the faux manly type who are a-okay with such an act. But I think she seriously miscalculated how much most people, MAGAs included, love dogs. There’s a reason you just can’t kill the dog, not without a specific plot need, in movies. You can annihilate a whole town, but the dog has to make it out alive.
Sure there are farmers who might disapprove of the method but otherwise not be particularly moved. But I think that’s of subset of farmers, who are already a small minority (1% maybe). I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that 95% (or more) are horrified by someone shooting a puppy in the face with a shotgun.
That picture of Cricket makes me so sad and angry. What a sweet face.
Kill puppies