Politicians being cruel to dogs
Never a good move - Kristi Noem's autobiography and other howlers
Trump vice-president hopeful and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has hit the news this weekend, and not in a good way. Her forthcoming autobiography contains a story of her taking her 14 month old wire-haired pointer, Cricket, to a gravel pit and shooting her. “I hated that dog,” Noem writes, saying Cricket was “untrainable … dangerous” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”. She then also describes going on to kill a goat, first botching the job then finishing the animal off with a third shotgun shell.
Reaction has not been kind, mainly focused on the dog-killing (naturally) rather than the poor goat.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action committee founded by moderate conservatives and former Republican Party members, released a video saying: “Dog owners know our furry friends can be a lot to keep up with. But when those tough moments come, you have options. Shooting your dog in the face should not be one of them. And if you do happen to shoot your dog in the face, please, don’t write about it in your autobiography. This has been a public service announcement directed at any Republican who may be considering murdering their dog.”
Colleen O Brien, senior director at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), criticized Noem for allowing "this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home."
Meghan McCain, daughter of John McCain, commented: “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc. But not from killing a dog… Good luck with that VP pick lady.”
In more innocent times, Mitt Romney, a presidential candidate in 2008 and 2012, came unstuck after admitting to strapping his Irish setter to the roof of his station wagon for a 12 hour journey. When Seamus suffered a terror-induced bout of diarrhoea and the Romney family saw the evidence streaking down the back window, Romney stopped at a service station, cleaned Seamus up, put him right back on the roof and continued the journey. President Romney was consequently never a thing, although his campaign also suffered when videos leaked of him speaking French and being outed as an “elitist, European-style liberal wimp”.
Over in little old Britain, as usual we have our milder, more comical examples. Conservative MP Mark Menzies has been suspended for alleged misuse of Party funds (specifically accessing £5,000 to pay some “bad people” who were imprisoning him in a flat at 3am - a story he denies) but his copybook is barely visible under the blots accumulated during his career. Previous blots include a story (which he denied) that he paid a Brazilian rent boy for sex and asked him to get hold of some Class B drug methedrone for him, and most damaging of all, that he got a dog drunk. He was accused of locking himself in a friend’s house, drunkenly feeding a dog alcohol and then starting a brawl when the friend confronted him about it. The friend was landed with a vet’s bill of nearly £500 for treating the dog for “intoxication” and “poisoning”. Menzies denied the story. Menzies’ misfortune is that these three bizarre stories will inevitably fuse into one as we get older and we will recall Menzies being locked in a house with some bad people while he paid a Brazilian dog for sex and force-fed it methedrone. Doubtless Menzies will deny the story.
Back in the US, TV personality Mehmet Oz unexpectedly lost a Pennsylvania Senate election in 2022 to John Fetterman, his cause not advanced by stories that during his earlier medical career, he experimented on live animals and caused the deaths of at least 329 dogs, 31 pigs, and 661 rabbits and rodents. “Dr Oz is a puppy killer” tweeted his rival Fetterman, who then tweeted a picture with this two dogs “hugging them extra tight tonight”.
In the UK, our politicians can’t get close to that industrial level of cruelty, and the most recent example we have is “Cruella” Braverman standing on a guide dog’s tail at last year’s Conservative Party conference. There’s no suggestion she did so deliberately but there’s also no suggestion that she did not derive a little buzz of sadistic pleasure as she ground her heel into the animal’s appendage. This is a woman, a daughter of immigrants, who said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight deport desperate asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In the 1970s, politician Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder. He allegedly hired a hitman to kill a gay lover, Norman Scott, who was threatening to expose their affair. The hitman killed Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, on Exmoor but the gun jammed when he aimed at Scott. The hitman got 2 years for killing the dog but Thorpe got off, rather bizarrely, though his career never recovered. Given how Britain was in the 1970s it may have played out better for Thorpe’s reputation if the hitman had killed Thorpe’s gay lover and left the dog unharmed. Allegedly etc. The whole salacious story is brilliantly dramatised in A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant.
So we await Donald Trump’s reaction to the furore that Kristi Noem’s dog-killing has provoked. I suspect Kristi has not harmed her VP chances and that Trump will struggle to give the tiniest stool sample about the whole story, in that it does not feature him or any of his many enemies. He also, as Vanity Fair points out, appears to hate dogs, peppering his invective with derogatory references to the creature like he is starring in some Spaghetti Western. It gives me an excuse to link to this fantastic Jimmy Kimmel piece comparing Obama’s report of Osama Bin Laden’s death with Trump’s report of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdad (“he died like a dog. A beautiful dog.”). Nothing could better illustrate the difference between the two men. Please watch.
I am quietly hopeful that Trump may be quite taken with Kristi Noem’s cruelty and adopt her as a running mate, oblivious to the fact that for many ordinary people, who can put up with insurrection and fraud, being nasty to dogs is a step too far.