Kristi Noem, Dog Assassin

 

SD Gov. Kristi Noem is getting a roasting over her depiction of killing a backwards "untrainable" puppy as well as a smelly goat that came from her political memoir No Going Back: Descriptive Stuff After the Colon. A lot of people on social media are posting pictures of their own good doggos--and that's great. But to give her her due, sometimes a dog just is either traumatized or dimwitted, or for some other reason has misplaced aggression issues, and they aren't fit to their environment. You could try rehoming them with a family--hopefully in a "single pet, no small children" situation, but once they have demonstrated they will kill livestock, like a neighbor's chickens, there's a real chance they aren't "fixable". She may have simply made a pragmatic choice with the dog because she didn't want to see it turn and attack a human--especially not a little one. 

There's more humane ways to put down an animal, though--we aren't living in Little House on the Prairie times. And also killing (poorly) a goat because it is smelly and misbehaved just feels gratuitous, because what do you expect from adult goat? And wasn't she responsible for how the dog was trained and controlled (crated or fenced?) Feels like she might have set that pup up by not preparing it for success.

Now, when someone comes out with a book, it sure does feel like thy have a political ambition, and people do say Noem wants to be Trump's running mate. She was one of the most covid-19 friendly governors in 2020. She put Trump on a figurative Mt. Rushmore. 

She got her teeth Mar-a-Lago standard veneered. She seems to have managed, right here in the 21st century, to have started some kind of Cold War between herself and Native Americans. (You just can't hardly rep white settlerhood harder than that.) 

But the big wild thing she's doing here is fully embracing and embodying the conservative archetype of the "hot chick with a firearm." There are so many pictures of this woman posing with a rifle or a dead critter circulating online it is like some kind of NRA spankbook titled "MILFS With Kills" or something. 

I'm urban My grandad was brought up on a farm though--he left before the pesticides could wind him up with Parkinsons. (He had brothers that weren't so lucky.) My dad went to agricultural HS. He has stories about how to treat a constipated horse with a hose.  But my people get meat from STORES. My husband is a butcher. I eat a shit ton of meat as a result. I am well aware it comes from dead critters. I don't romance the how of it or feel like I need to DIY. (Although I do like fishing.)  We have firearms. We just expect to use them on people, come to that. Not smelly goats, backwards puppies, or animals out of season or still with their young. 

But the conservative pioneer lady with a gun--the Mama Grizzly or whatever, is registering her authoritarian bona fides by demonstrating she can make hard and painful bloody choices. She isn't one of "those women" who have clean hands and eschews violence for dainty personal thinking reasons that probably are liberal and deeply suspect. She is showing she can do masculine things. S/He gets her hands right into the gotdamn entrails. S/He will kill a fucking puppy, see if she doesn't! 

I am not lampooning the culture from which she comes. Clearly people do what they can to eat, and I am not mocking that part. (I just question how much Noem's hunting culture is signifying rather than the need to hunt for protein.) I am thinking she's playing it up a lot. Also: I just find it wild as hell that conservatives are often so misogynistic (and ironically, I think Noem is, too!), but when a woman with a pretty face seems to be a whole-ass sociopath, they really created a whole lane for that. 

Does she have a lane for VP though?  Can she demonstrate she'll do what Pence would not? Can she make Trump feel like she isn't a threat? 

I dunno. She sure is trying, though.