cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/20120801
The Guardian obtained a copy of Noem’s soon-to-be released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” In it, she tells the story of the ill-fated Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she was training for pheasant hunting.
On the way home from the hunting trip, Noem writes that she stopped to talk to a family. Cricket got out of Noem’s truck and attacked and killed some of the family’s chickens, then bit the governor.
“At that moment,” Noem writes, “I realized I had to put her down.” She led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her.
She writes, according to the Guardian, that the tale was included to show her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it has to be done. But backlash was swift against the Republican governor, who just a month ago drew attention and criticism for posting an infomercial-like video about cosmetic dental surgery she received out-of-state.
Sure, your young dog, who is still being trained, does something bad because of whatever reason, and instead of trying to find out why that happened and what could be done to prevent it in the future, the first solution you come up with is to kill the dog?? That’s not being able to act on tough decisions, that’s poor judgement, lack of empathy, signs of psychopathy and just being a bad person
Has she actually made any “tough decisions” that didn’t involve killing animals? All she’s showing me is that she thinks that killing things is a solution and one she might reach for with an uncomfortable eagerness.
If an animal has killed other people’s pets and attacked humans, I think that’s past the point of speculating about how you might possibly get it to not do those things in the future. More likely some half measures will be taken, that will fail, and it will happen again. I am biased but dogs that kill other pets should be put down as a matter of law.
Yeah, she grew up on a farm, animals are tools, yadda yadda yadda. I can accept that decisions sometimes have to be made that are not meant to be cruel. Here though, the fact that she made the call unilaterally, casually, and without considering other options that might have been available for a dog but not other “livestock.” She also stated that she “hated” the dog. Then, the way the article phrases it, it sounds like she got her blood up and decided that it was the day to do all her up close and personal killin’ and took out the goat she didn’t like. Oh, and let’s also not forget that her kids clearly liked the dog. This is what she decides add to her political bona fides.
There’s doing what has to be done, and then there’s seeming to get off on killing things that are less powerful than you but refuse to bend to your desires.
“refuses to bend to your desires” is pretty far from “killed multiple farm animals and bit a person”. This is exactly the situation with many people, with a pitbull named “Princess”, which bites, attacks people, and the owners say “oh our boy never hurt a soul he’s such a good dog”.
“Puppy on the way home from being trained to hunt birds, kills birds.”
Fcking exactly. She irresponsibly let loose an untrained bird-hunting pup, still having zoomies from a failed hunt, to a chicken coop. Guess what the pup did? Hunt birds, like it was told to minutes earlier.
“random enraged user on Lemmy doesn’t know how pointer dogs work but needs to throw their 3c in”
But even then, there are other options to consider first before killing, even more deciding it on your own
Behavioral euthanasia is a thing. If you think that she just got the dog, it was all fine and dandy, and then one day it killed a chicken, bit a dude but was otherwise a well behaved good dog, then you are naive. She most likely saw the writing on the wall earlier, worked with the dog (since it was meant to be a working, hunting dog), till the dog went too far and had to be put down. An article reduces all sort of things to a simple “politician bad”, calling to emotion. The truth of the matter is she probably knows her shit more than any of us here, you don’t get a working dog for the fun of it, as a pet, without knowing anything about them or how to train them. Some dogs can “come back” from aggression, some don’t.
See Gold Shaw Farm on youtube, he has two working dogs. One, Toby, is very behaved, guarding the flock, not showing signs of aggression. The second dog he got later is Abby, which is an overexcited, dangerous to the animals dog. He trained both, in fact Abby came later, so he didn’t make the mistakes he did with Toby. Yet Abby, after years of training, still shows aggression sometimes and needs to be reeled in. Abby has killed his chickens in the past. Luckily with her, she mostly targetted white chickens, not people or the entire flock, and she has a “paragon of virtue” in Toby, who also sometimes gets her to stop. Yet the owner spayed her, despite wanting to breed farm dogs, because he knew her behavior will probably end up in the puppies.
Now imagine what would happen, if Abby was so dangerous, she would bite people, kill chickens, ducks or geese. She would be out of there in a heartbeat. You simply can’t have a working dog that does that. Same with the “failed drug sniffers” where dogs are too excited to work with humans correctly, or have other undesirable traits. They get adopted out of service at best, and if incredibly aggressive and dangerous to people, they get put down.
The linked Guardian has the longer version. Training wasn’t going well, but she made a spur of the moment decision that training was done. No rethinking said training. No spaying to keep the traits out of the bloodline. No deciding if a different role in the household would be appropriate. No rehoming the dog to one without birds. No rescue or even a county shelter. Not even a sober discussion with her kids to let them say goodbye and then a humane euthanasia.
No, the dog embarrassed her and cost her money, so she shot it. Then, she was in a killin’ mood, so the goat had to go too, apparently the same day. And she did a bad job with that one so it sat there with a gunshot wound until she could get to the truck and back, and there were other people in sight, so it was all safe and well thought out (/s).
Then she brags about it like it was a good thing. I will stand by it: people in rural areas and in agriculture have to have a different relationship with mammalian life and death and have to make tough calls, but this shithead is just cruel.
After the dog bit her and killed animals. I won’t repeat myself, since I said everything and yet you don’t read it. You say that people in agriculture / rural areas treat dogs differently (which again, is not a distinction between rural and urban, it is a distinction between working dogs and pets). Yet you still want this to be about “cruel monster shoots dog cause she wants to kill”.
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Okay but we’re talking about a fucking puppy who didn’t do a damn thing to anyone or anything.
A fucking puppy. The most they can do is chew on something or shit all over the place.
You are talking about a 14 month old working dog. To be a hunting dog, the owner must work with the animal for incredibly long. She saw aggression before, then the dog got out, killed chickens and attacked her. Then she realized it went past the point of no return, You are incredibly naive and basically fell for a call to emotion in a clickbait article.
Tell me about how the goat deserved it next.
Meme all you want, it won’t change the fact that you guys live in a totally different realities where a dog is a cute little puppy to be cherished, instead of a companion animal that works alongside you.
Not memeing. You want to defend a psycho bitch you do it all the way. Why did the goat deserve to get capped too?
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Because sometimes dogs aggressiveness isn’t the matter of training, it’s behavioral issues that could in fact never be corrected. Hence behavioral euthanasia.
My childhood dog killed the family of rabbits in our backyard the first spring we had him. Should we have put him down then and there since he was clearly a killer? What about ky husky that kills ever opossum that she comes across? Dogs are predators and it takes training to keep their killer instincts under control, and even then you can inly do so much.
I think it is a little different if it is your own pets vs someone else’s. Why should the rest of community trust the judgment and ability of someone to retrain their dog after something like that, and their assurances that it won’t happen again?
If there’s a very high chance keeping a dog is going to result in violence being done to the people around you and their pets, maybe it shouldn’t be an option in the first place. Breeds of dogs with very high prey drives, ownership of them should probably be more restricted than it is.
Has it bitten humans and was overly aggressive towards them too?