Taking the story at face value:
Quote:
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.
Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.
Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also
represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
A young working dog that can't be controlled and destroys livestock is a major liability. You don't keep animals like that around the farm, any more than you'd keep a dog who bites children around the neighborhood. I wouldn't enjoy it but I also wouldn't try to pawn it off to anyone else once it's shown those instincts.
We raise chickens and hatch our own. Sometimes those turn out to be roosters. No one wants roosters. I destroy them before they attack a kid or dog (both have happened) or generally waste more money by feeding them. The fact that it's a dog doesn't move the needle for me as much as it does for other people. You simply don't keep dangerous animals around on a farm.
Again, setting aside the veracity of the story and her intent in telling it, the story itself registers completely differently depending on which side of the urban-rural divide the audience falls.
The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W
