Kristi Noem’s New Book Includes a Bizarrely Detailed Account of Killing Her Pet Dog

From an infomercial extolling the work of a Texas dentistry practice to an anti-drug ad campaign called Meth. We’re on It, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem has made a number of head-scratching choices during her time in public office. Probably the most head-scratching to date? The decision to vividly detail killing her pet dog, as well as a goat, in a new book out next month.

Yes, The Guardian reports that in No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem graphically recounts executing her family’s dog, Cricket, who—it may not surprise you to hear—she says she “hated.” Cricket, Noem writes, was a 14-month-old wirehair pointer who needed to be trained to hunt pheasants. So one day, she took her on a hunt with older dogs in the hope that they would help the young pup learn the ropes. But Cricket did not learn—and for that she had to die.

Here’s the insanely explicit account, per The Guardian:

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.”

Just a quick note: It’s an interesting choice on Noem’s part to describe Cricket as an “assassin” in a section about how—spoiler alert—she shot her own dog at close range. But we digress.

When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me.” Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologized, 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 realized I had to put her down.”

Does Noem end the story there and leave the rest to people’s imaginations? No, no she does not.

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 realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

That’s right: Noem had another animal to kill.

Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean,” because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes. Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit,” the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

If that wasn’t nightmare-inducing enough, Noem adds that after she was done with her grisly killings, she realized a construction crew had witnessed the whole thing. Then, we shit you not, she writes that a school bus pulled up and dropped her kids off, apparently just narrowly missing her American Psycho: Four-Legged Friends Edition moment. “Kennedy looked around confused,” she writes of her daughter, who then asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

As a reminder, Noem is currently on a short list of candidates under consideration by Donald Trump to be his VP. And while her tales of dog- and goat-killing probably won‘t play well with many Americans, as most famously love dogs and regard them as family members, it might actually win her points with the ex-president, who famously hates man’s best friend.