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South Dakota Gov Kristi Noem has blamed the “fake news” media for stirring up controversy over the killing of her young dog, which she detailed in her new memoir.
Ms Noem, who has been touted as a potential Donald Trump running mate in November, made yet another attempt to explain her putting down of 14-month-old “working dog” Cricket during an appearance on Fox News.
In the book, No Going Backshe writes that she killed the young animal after a pair of incidents in a single day wherein the dog ruined a pheasant hunt by eagerly chasing the birds, then “massacred” a neighbour’s chickens, killing a number of.
She tried additional harm management throughout an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday when she tried accountable the media for the eye the incident was receiving.
“Well, Sean, you know how the fake news works. They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it. And that’s what’s happened in this case,” Ms Noem advised Hannity.
“I hope people really do buy this book and they find out the truth of the story because the truth of the story is that this was a working dog and it was not a puppy. It was a dog that was extremely dangerous.”
The governor went on to clarify that her household had been the canine’s “second chance” after it had been rehomed as soon as earlier than because of aggression.
She additionally famous: “Virtually every state has a law in place that says the animals that attack and kill livestock can be put down in situations like this.”
Ms Noem has spent the previous week in harm management mode over the dog-killing story; she has been pilloried by political commentators, Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and extra as many speculate the anecdote has ruined her once-serious probabilities of changing into Donald Trump’s operating mate.
“I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me,” Senator Mitt Romney joked to HuffPost this week. His presidential ambitions have been flattened partly due to a narrative popularised by the Obama marketing campaign in 2012 about how he had put his household’s canine in a crate tied to the roof of his automotive.
Adding to the criticism that Ms Noem has confronted, a side of the dialogue she didn’t tackle throughout her Hannity interview on Wednesday, is the emotional language which she used to explain the canine in her e-book: “I hated that dog … less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
There’s additionally the issue of the goat. In the identical anecdote, Ms Noem described how she determined to place down certainly one of her household’s goats on the identical second — apparently because of the goat’s poor mood. In that vein, she describes how she killed the goat with two shotgun blasts separated by a walk again to her automotive for extra shells, an obvious admission that the animal suffered solely an agonising wound from the primary spherical.
“The reason it’s in the book is because this book is filled with tough, challenging decisions I’ve had to make throughout my life,” she argued on Hannity. “The point of this story is most politicians, they will run from the truth, they will shy away and hide from making tough decisions. I don’t do either of those.”
But as governor of a deeply conservative state, and now dropping down the checklist of potential Trump VP nominees, Ms Noem could by no means get an opportunity to do battle with an actual ideological opponent on the nationwide stage.
Term-limited, she gained re-election to a six-year time period in 2022 with greater than 60 per cent of the vote. Ms Noem beforehand made headlines in April after she staked out a far-right stance on abortion rights and got here out in opposition to exceptions for rape or incest in statewide abortion bans.
