Kristi Noem has insisted she “absolutely loves animals” as she reflected on killing her family dog in an interview.
The Homeland Security secretary said she has no regrets about destroying her 14-month-old wire haired pointer puppy Cricket, which she wrote about in her 2024 memoir No Going Back to widespread outrage.
“I absolutely love animals. I’ve always had dogs. I still have a dog that goes everywhere with me. And that situation there was hard,” Noem, 53, said on the New York Post podcast Pod Force One.
“The dog [Cricket] was actively killing animals for fun, had been massacring chickens and then had tried to bite me and attack me.”
”That is something that happens from time to time, and keeping children and people safe is incredibly important,” she added. “At that time, we had little kiddos around every single day in a hunting lodge we were operating … I knew that I needed to take responsibility for the situation.”
The former South Dakota governor faced widespread criticism she detailed how she killed the puppy two decades ago in her book.
In the book she described Cricket as “untrainable” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog”, adding that she she also shot a “disgusting, musky, rancid” billy goat at her hunting lodge which would “chase kids.”
South Park spoofed the dog killing in a recent episode and last year both Saturday Night Live and PETA ridiculed her for it.
The revelations of Cricket’s demise are also believed to have severely damaged her chances of becoming vice president last year, as she was not named last June when the Trump campaign requested personal information for eight possible vice presidential picks, according to Politico.
“That story about this hunting dog had been used against me in political campaigns,” she told the Podcast. “People in the state knew it, they had tried to attack me with it, and I decided to tell the truth of the story in the book.”
But Noem claimed in the interview that the story of Cricket’s death actually helped her to pitch herself to Donald Trump for the Homeland Security role which has her overseeing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“When [Trump] asked me after he won the election if I would be interested in being in his Cabinet, what position I would be interested in, I asked for Homeland Security,” she said.
“He said, ‘I didn’t know you would be interested in that. Why would you be interested in it?’ I said, ‘Sir, because you’re gonna have to have somebody who’s tough enough to do it.'”
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