Shooting dogs and goats, and not meeting Kim Jong Un
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-06-25)
Donald Trump and Kirsti Noem at a recent Trump rally
Since January 2019, Kristi Noem has been the formidable Governor of South Dakota and her uncompromising conservative positions on taxation, healthcare and gun rights would have in any case made her a leading candidate for Donald Trump’s running mate in this year’s election. Aside from being articulate, striking in appearance and appearing politically savvy, she received national attention for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, opting against statewide lockdowns and mandates. Noem is a vocal supporter of Trump's policies and has adopted similar stances on key issues such as immigration, economic policy and law enforcement. But this was all before she dragged her dog and goat, and Kim Jong Un, into the national conversation.
Last April, following the publishing by The Guardian of an excerpt from her (Freudian titled) book, No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem was forced to redact her recollection of meeting and admonishing Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea, mainly because it never happened. But that absurdity (which she tried to suggest somehow entered the book by accident) quickly faded into obscurity because of what she proudly agreed did happen.
In what could be seen as a rare achievement, Noem drew bipartisan backlash over her tragic story about her dog, Cricket. The incident occurred on the family farm which she grew up on and where her father was killed in a farm machinery accident in 1994, the same year her daughter was born. The future political leader left college to move back home and help run the farm with her siblings, later expanding it with a hunting lodge and restaurant (at least that’s according to Wikipedia).
Cricket was her 14-month-old wirehair pointer, which Noem describes as ‘untrainable’ and ‘dangerous’. After he attacked and killed a local family’s chickens and bit her, she decided to put the dog down which she describes as a necessary but unpleasant task. Taking Cricket to a gravel pit, Noem returned to the farm for bullets and on her way she decided it was a good time to also kill their ‘nasty and mean’ uncastrated goat with a ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ smell. The goat had a habit of chasing and knocking down her children so Noem shot him and Cricket, describing both as tough decisions, unavoidable on a farm. She wrote that workmen who witnessed her actions, told her shocked uncle that ‘they hurried back to work before [she] decided they were next!’.
On a summer’s day in 2000, I was helping out at the Dialann Deoraí, Welcome Home Festival, inviting our Moygownagh diaspora to visit the parish. It was organised by our much-loved parish priest, Fr Francis Judge (who subsequentially emigrated himself to Crossmolina). I recall standing in the sun-drenched car park by the community centre, when approached by a well-dressed elderly man, asking if I was Alec Heffron’s grandson. I only remember his name as (maybe) Pryal, from Cooneal, and forgot to get his contact details, thus proving how even an absent-minded eejit can get a Ph.D.
When Mr Pryal heard I was helping out with history talks for the celebrations, he smiled and asked me did I know anything of my great-grandfather – James Heffron. My blank face ignited a loud laugh and he gently chided me that history begins at home. As a lad, he worked for ‘Jamsie Mór’, a Ballycastle native, who returned from America in the 1920s with his young family, to build a thriving general merchant and egg exporting enterprise, with a farm, in Moygownagh. While his only son was set to inherit the business, they had a falling out and the headstrong Alec went up to the village and built a new shop (now Mitchell’s supermarket and pub). For a time, both merchants plied their competing trades with logic that only survives in forgotten family arguments.
‘I can remember one evening, James Heffron, who was getting-on by now, had decided to put down his auld dog and had tied it in the middle of the hayshed. He was going to shoot it but ran out of cartridges, so he sent me up to Alec to buy some. I ran up the road and Alec gave them to me half-asking ‘if they were for himself or the dog’. It was evening so I hurried back and watched James load them into his shotgun in front of the dog who was by now half mad, barking, jumping and leaping in the shed as far as his rope would allow – probably not helped by having the gun barrel pointed at him. I watched the circus unfold as the swearing James would unsteadily try to line up the dog, but miss, with each loud gunshot sending both the dog and man into further apoplexy. After a stream of curses and near misses, your great-grandfather realised I was still there, witnessing his failure to kill the dog and so turned to me with, ‘Aragh feck it a mhac, Aleceen is after giving you bent cartridges!’. He then shuffled off into the house and the dog had a respite’. Taking his story in I wondered aloud, ‘what happened the dog?’. Mr Pryal smiled wryly, ‘the cartridges unbent themselves overnight’. Then he was off, seeking to bend the ears of old acquaintances.
This story I have told many times since, leaving my listeners with many thoughts, but not once has anyone questioned my humanity, or that of my forefathers, on the basis of cruelty to the dog. But then again I’m not running for political office here in the USA.
Kirsti Noem was not so fortunate. Within minutes of the release of extracts of her book, while proving that America draws the line at killing pets, all shades of politics briefly united in condemning her shooting of Cricket. Whatever her intentions of using this story to display her ability in making tough decisions and carry them through, it instead immediately condemned her chances of being Trump’s running mate. As reported by CNN, the former president reacted by saying ‘Until this week, she was doing incredibly well. And she got hit hard and sometimes you do books and you have some guy writing a book and you maybe don’t read it as carefully, you know. You have ghost writers do it, they help you, and they, in this case, didn’t help too much’. He should know.
But Noem had at the very least read it – she even narrated the audio book – and so knew full well what was in the pages. Her strident defence that this what happens when you grow up on a farm, was ridiculed by people who didn’t and she was attacked as both a liar and a cruel sociopath by both the left and right. She pulled out of her media tour promoting her book and thus effectively ended any remaining ambitions for higher office. I do wonder, if she had used Aleceen’s bent cartridges or even only killed the goat would she be Trump’s running mate now?