In the book, Noem, who has been discussed as a possible running mate for former President Trump, describes growing angry with the nearly 14-month-old “Cricket,” a wirehaired pointer, during a hunting trip.
Noem shot the dog after taking it on a pheasant hunt.
She writes that she had taken Cricket on the hunt hoping she would learn from older dogs, but that instead the younger dog ruined the hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” per the Guardian.
On the way home, the dog escaped her truck and attacked a local family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” Noem wrote.
When Noem tried to grab the dog, she wrote that it whipped around to bite her. Noem said she wrote the family a check for their chickens and helped them dispose of the carcasses “littering the scene of the crime.”
“I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that Cricket was untrainable, dangerous and worthless as a hunting dog.
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
She then led Cricket to a gravel pit on her property and shot it, writing it was “not a pleasant job” but it “had to be done.”