Minnesota Senator Tina Smith wants Kristi Noem to know that she hasn’t forgotten that the dumped Homeland Security boss once shot and killed a puppy.
Smith posted a photo on X on Tuesday afternoon of herself cuddling a puppy. The 68-year-old captioned it, “Don’t worry buddy, Kristi Noem isn’t around anymore.”
“Damn, Tina,” one X user replied to the Senator’s post.
The jab was a reference to Noem’s self-own in 2024 when the then-Governor of South Dakota wrote about killing her 14-month-old dog Cricket in her memoir-slash-political-polemic No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.
In the book, Noem, 54, said she took Cricket out on a pheasant hunt with older dogs to teach her how to behave, but Cricket was a menace, having so much fun that she disrupted the entire hunt.
On the way home, Noem wrote, they stopped to talk to a neighbor with chickens and the untrained Cricket got loose and killed the birds one by one.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote in the book, before going on to detail how she led Cricket to a gravel pit in her yard and shot her dead. She also killed a goat the same afternoon, finishing off her grisly spree just before her daughter arrived home from school and asked, “Where’s Cricket?”
Noem claimed she used the story in her book as an illustration that she was able to make tough decisions. But when the news broke as she was being touted as a possible vice presidential candidate on Donald Trump’s ticket, she was roundly condemned as cruel.
Animal lovers from all sides of politics pointed out that the dog was still a puppy, not properly trained, and perfectly healthy. It could have been re-homed.
But Noem, either not able to, or refusing to read the room, seemed to adopt the ‘all press is good press’ adage and responded to the outcry by doubling down.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years,” Noem posted on X. She then linked to her book, using the incident to promote sales.
Asked about the puppy-killing in a TV interview on CNN almost two months after the controversy broke, Noem said she still did not regret shooting Cricket, even though she was no longer being considered as a VP option.
“That story is a 20-year-old story of a mom who made a very difficult decision to protect her children from a vicious animal that was attacking livestock and killing livestock and attacking people,” Noem said, framing Cricket as a villain, not an untrained puppy.
The incident continued to dog Noem right up until the end of her tenure as Homeland Security Secretary, when she was grilled by a fellow Republican over her time as ICE boss at a Senate Judiciary hearing in March.
“I train dogs, alright? And you are a farmer, you should know better,” Senator Thom Tillis scolded Noem. “You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training, and then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices.”
Tillis linked Noem’s murderous anecdote to her handling of the shooting deaths of two Minnesotans—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—during ICE operations in Minneapolis in January.
“My point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis,” he raged on. “We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership, and you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”
Noem was fired by President Donald Trump days later.
