- South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem now has just a 4% chance of being Trump’s VP
- Her slide in the VP odds coincides with her dog killing story becoming public
- Sen. Tim Scott, Rep. Elise Stefanik and Sen. J.D. Vance are the favorite VP picks
After South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem admitted killing her dog and a family goat in her new book, her chances of becoming Donald Trump‘s vice president have completely crashed, according to an online betting market.
On Polymarket, where gamblers can bet on just about anything under the sun, Noem’s self-admitted shooting of her 14-month-old wirehair pointer puppy has tanked her odds of being Trump’s running mate to just 4 percent, way down from the 10 percent chance she had just this Thursday, Newsweek reported.
Bettors think South Carolina Senator Tim Scott has the best shot – a 22 percent chance – at becoming Trump’s new right hand man, while New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance – long considered potential favorites for the VP slot – are sitting at 9 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
This comes as President Joe Biden has recently overtaken the GOP’s assumed candidate Trump in the betting odds of who’ll win the election, with people favoring the Democrat by a little over a percentage point.
Noem explains in her forthcoming book that she gunned down her own animals to show she’s capable of dealing with anything that’s ‘difficult, messy and ugly.’
The book, titled No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, will be released on May 7.
In her book, Noem writes about the dog, named Cricket, that 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.
‘It was not a pleasant job,’ Noem said, ‘but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.’
Noem decided to off the family goat as well because he was ‘nasty and mean,’ as he remained uncastrated and smelled ‘disgusting, musky [and] rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ the governor’s children.
She ‘dragged him to the gravel pit’ as well, but the goat jumped as she tried to shoot him, leaving him briefly alive.
Noem said she had to go back to her truck and retrieve another shell and then ‘hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.’
Her actions were witnessed, she said, by a construction crew working nearby.
Moments later, the bus dropped off her kids.
‘Kennedy looked around confused,’ Noem recalled of her daughter, who asked, ‘Hey where’s Cricket?’
Noem then admitted, ‘I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.’
On Friday the internet was buzzing with reactions to her story.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a sharp critic of Trump who used to be his White House communications director, wrote on X that anyone ‘who would needlessly hurt an animal because they are inconvenient needs help.’
‘I’m a dog lover and I am honestly horrified by the Kristi Noem excerpt. I wish I hadn’t even read it. A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained.
‘A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them,’ Griffin wrote.
Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Noem ‘trash.’
‘Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO,’ he noted.
‘Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent. She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog. Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable,’ he said. ‘We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch.’
Wilson said that old dogs, hurt dogs and sick dogs should be humanely put down ‘not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit.’
‘Unsporting and deliberately cruel … but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point,’ Wilson said.
