After a bizarre episode this week in which media reports began circulating evident portions from a forthcoming book by South Dakota GOP Governor Kristi Noem in which she describes killing a family dog, Democratic governors publicly trolled the South Dakotan leader with images of themselves with dogs in which they’re looking, well, much more normal.
Governors who participated included Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and Ned Lamont of Connecticut. “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Lamont’s caption read, mirroring the posts from the other Democrats.
Noem, meanwhile, defended herself Thursday… or at least tried to. “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years,” she wrote on her personal account on X, formerly Twitter. Yeah, most Americans probably don’t relate to killing a dog that apparently wasn’t even severely sick (aka, what leads to putting down some animals) or similarly impaired. The evident sections of her soon forthcoming book reported by The Guardian also included a story of killing a goat, by the way!
It’s difficult to fathom why a politician presumably seeking at least some kind of stability in their public image would willingly share a story of killing a dog. Noem does know that a lot of people like dogs, right? She’s considered a potential pick for vice president on the Trump ticket heading into this November’s elections, though Trump certainly has a lot else with which to grapple in the meantime. But imagine it, made a possibility by the current state of the Republican Party: an admitted dog-killer on a major party’s presidential ticket for November.
