Vice President JD Vance has declared that only a “really terrible person” would mistreat a dog, apparently forgetting that his cabinet colleague Kristi Noem bragged about executing a puppy in her memoir just last year.
Vance, 41, was appearing on The New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast when he and host Miranda Devine got into a discussion about the controversy that has engulfed Twitch streamer Hasan Piker after his followers spotted his dog wearing an electronic training collar in a video and accused him of using it to administer corrective shocks to the animal, which Piker denied.
Devine asked the vice president what he believed a willingness to hurt dogs revealed about an owner.
“I think it tells you that they’re bad people,” he answered. “If you can actually cause suffering to an innocent animal, you’re probably the kind of person who doesn’t worry about suffering in people as well and that’s been my experience. If you mistreat dogs, that’s a 100 percent sign that you’re gonna be a really terrible person.”
Alluding to his own German shepherd, Vance continued: “That’s one of the ways to really, sort of, test people… If Atlas responds well to them, if they like Atlas, we know they’re good people but, you can tell if somebody is really mean to animals.
“You know, it’s like the Jeffrey Dahmer thing. Like every serial killer ever has actually been really bad to animals, that’s sort of how they started. I remember the Freddy Krueger movies when I was a kid… Well how did Freddy Krueger [get] his start? One of the things they show is young Freddy Krueger torturing animals.
“If you’re not taking care of God’s creatures then you are certainly going to be, I think, a pretty bad person in other ways too.”
The meandering exchange called to mind both President Donald Trump’s previous scaremongering about non-existent pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during last year’s election campaign and his regular invocation of another fictional murderer, the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter.
But perhaps most significantly, it recalled Trump’s homeland security secretary making international headlines in April 2024 after she revealed in her memoir No Going Back that she had once shot dead her family dog Cricket, a 14-month-old female wirehaired pointer, as well as a “disgusting, musky, rancid” goat kept at her South Dakota hunting lodge.
The anecdotes were intended to convey her willingness to take tough decisions, but instead provoked an outcry from appalled animal lovers and inspired widespread ridicule. The scandal may also have cost Noem her shot at being Trump’s running mate, ultimately to Vance’s advantage.
“That’s not good at all,” the then-Republican presidential candidate reportedly told his son Donald Trump Jr in reaction to the story. “Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything.”
Noem has never managed to shake off the matter and was ridiculed over it by the creators of South Park earlier this year, which depicted her carrying out a bloody massacre in a pet store during an ICE operation.
