Kristi Noem’s team cut dog-killing story from her first book fearing the impact it would have on her ‘brand’…but her new team did not stand in the way

As the controversy over the tale that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem once killed her own dog, it has been revealed that Noem actually tried to tell the story two years earlier.

Noem has found herself making headlines and all but out of contention to be Donald Trump’s vice president nominee following revelations she shot dead her 14-month-old dog Cricket.

The story was detailed in an excerpt from her new book, titled No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, which will be released on May 7.

Even Congressional Republicans have been willing to go on record to suggest that shooting her dog was a killer for Noem’s VP chances. 

Now, it’s been noted that Noem had the anecdote axed from her 2022 book due to the publishers worried it would harm her brand.

Noem wanted the story in the tome, ‘Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From the Heartland’ because she believed it showed her as decisive and unwilling to avoid tough choices, according to Politico. 

Hachette Book Group editors and publicists wanted to take an axe to the story, as did Noem’s agents, who saw it as being in bad taste. They eventually got their way.

While that book made the New York Times’ bestseller list and got Noem onto Trump’s radar, it didn’t dominate the news cycle.

The difference with the new book, according to sources, are that Hachette handed the new book over to their conservative-leaning imprint Center Street.

Noem’s team, this time around, made no objection to sharing the dog-killing story, though Noem’s team has not publicly commented on the report. 

The dog controversy, which has gotten even her fellow conservatives riled up and angry at her on social media, has forced Noem to do damage control. 

‘I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch,’ she wrote Sunday on X. ‘The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did.’

‘As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way.’ 

Noem writes in the new book about the dog she shot at the gravel pit on her family property, moments before her children came home from school.

The dog, Noem claimed, had an ‘aggressive personality’ that couldn’t be tamed – as evidenced by the fact that Cricket ruined a pheasant hunt for being ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.’ 

Additionally when the South Dakota governor took Cricket with her to meet a local family the dog started killing the family’s chickens like ‘a trained assassin.’

According to a book excerpt obtained by the Guardian, Cricket ‘grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.’ 

When Noem finally grabbed the dog she wrote that Cricket ‘whipped around to bite me.’

Cricket was ‘the picture of pure joy.’ Meanwhile the chickens’ owner wept.

Noem said she wrote a check ‘for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.’ 

‘I hated that dog,’ Noem wrote, believing the 14-month-old pooch to be ‘untrainable,’ ‘dangerous to anyone she came in conatct with’ and ‘less than worthless … as a hunting dog.’ 

So she decided to kill Cricket.

‘At that moment,’ the governor wrote. ‘I realized I had to put her down.’ 

She shot Cricket at the family’s gravel pit. 

The revelation has proved unpopular and damaging to her reputation across the board, which Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana noted.

‘Bipartisan outrage! I was just amazed that for once there was not a Blue America, there was not a Red America, there was one America,’ Cassidy said.

‘That’s just like crazy. Why would you do that to a puppy? It’s just crazy,’ he said.