A Republican senator eviscerated Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for killing her dog and then bragging about it.
“Secretary, I read your book last week,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said while questioning her in a hearing today. “The passage where you talked about killing a dog that was 14 months old… I train dogs, alright? And you are a farmer. You should know better. You should know that if you’re going out to a hunting lodge and you’re putting pheasants out and you’re putting dogs out, you don’t take a puppy out there. A 14-month-old dog is basically a teenager in dog years.”
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“You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time and training, and then you have the audacity to say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices!” Tillis said, also bringing up how Noem bragged about killing a goat in her book. He blamed her for not castrating the goat, saying that was why it was misbehaving.
Tillis compared her decisions to kill the animals to her leadership in the situation in Minnesota, where the Department of Homeland Security – which has control of ICE – has been brutalizing citizens, arresting and detaining people just because they look like they could be immigrants, and killing people who record what they do.
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“We’re an exceptional nation,” Tillis said. “And one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that in the time that I’ve seen you responding to the emergency in North Carolina and across the Southeast.”
Tillis has been one of the few elected Republicans to criticize the administration at all. He previously called the administration’s saber-rattling with NATO over Greenland “stupid,” but later said that he didn’t mean to call the president stupid, he just meant to criticize the president’s advisors.
Noem’s book from 2024, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, contains a passage where she brags about killing her dog, Cricket, “a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” because he misbehaved.
She wrote that the dog was “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog.”
Noem said that Cricket attacked another family’s chickens. The dog “grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” The dog “whipped around to bite me,” she said, when she tried to stop it.
She called the dog “a trained assassin” and said that she apologized to the other family and wrote them a check to pay for the chickens.
“At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.” Noem got her gun and took the dog to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” Noem wrote. “And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
After killing Cricket, she recounted, she took a male goat to the gravel pit and shot it as well because it was “nasty and mean.”
Her daughter, Kennedy, “looked around confused” when she was dropped off at the bus stop.
“Hey, where’s Cricket?” the daughter asked.
“I guess if I were a better politician, I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote.
When the book passage was reported on by The Guardian, many speculated that it was likely a smart move as a politician to tell that story publicly, since many on the right overvalue violence and believe that being able to kill shows leadership ability. She was nominated as Secretary of Homeland Security several months later.
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