Utah senator Mitt Romney rejected any comparisons between his 2012 canine scandal and the unravelling one involving South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who wrote about killing her puppy in her new guide, No Going Back.
“I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me,” Mr Romney stated, as a 17-year-old story appears to have come again to hang-out him.
When the Utah Republican was operating for president in 2007, the now-epic story emerged of Mr Romney tying his Irish setter Seamus to the highest of his station wagon – with a protect in entrance of the canine to guard him from freeway gusts – throughout a household highway journey.
Now, Mr Romney is firmly distancing himself from the South Dakota Republican, who wrote in her forthcoming memoir that she shot her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, calling the pooch “untrainable” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” Ms Noem wrote. “I realised I had to put her down.”
She conceded that whereas “it was not a pleasant job… it had to be done”.
The South Dakota governor is taken into account to be on Mr Trump’s vice-president shortlist – however this story may hinder her possibilities, Mr Romney argued.
He instructed the HuffPost: “I guess it kind of makes it a little difficult for President Trump to find someone to be his [vice-president].”
He added, “He has to look for someone smarter than him, [a] better speaker than him and, like him, does not get burdened with principles.”
Five years after Romney’s dog story was unveiled, The Washington Post wrote about how the story nonetheless plagued him as he ran for president once more.
Seemingly in a misguided try to defend herself, Ms Noem took to X to level out “tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm” earlier than mentioning that “we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years”.
She continued to double down on her choice on Sunday. “I can understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book.”
“The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown some aggressive behaviour toward people by biting them, I decided what I did.”
