WASHINGTON — Kristi Noem loves animals — some more than others.
The Homeland Security secretary insisted to columnist Miranda Devine that she had no regrets about revisiting destroying a “dangerous” family dog in a memoir that caused widespread outrage when it was published last year.
“I absolutely love animals. I’ve always had dogs. I still have a dog that goes everywhere with me. And that situation there was hard,” Noem, 53, said on the latest episode of the “Pod Force One” podcast.
The then-South Dakota governor left political commentators and millions of dog-lovers aghast when she detailed killing Cricket, a 14-month-old female wirehaired pointer, more than two decades earlier in her book, “No Going Back.”
“The dog [Cricket] was actively killing animals for fun, had been massacring chickens and then had tried to bite me and attack me,” she explained to Devine. ” … That is something that happens from time to time, and keeping children and people safe is incredibly important.
“At that time, we had little kiddos around every single day in a hunting lodge we were operating … I knew that I needed to take responsibility for the situation.”
In the book, Noem wrote that she “hated” Cricket, whom she called “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
For good measure, the future Trump Cabinet member mentioned in the book that she also shot a “disgusting, musky, rancid” smelling family billy goat that would “chase kids.”
The revelation led to mockery from online meme-makers and professional comedians, with Noem lampooned on both “Saturday Night Live” and “South Park.”
“That story about this hunting dog had been used against me in political campaigns,” she said on the podcast.
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“People in the state knew it, they had tried to attack me with it, and I decided to tell the truth of the story in the book.”
Noem acknowledged that President Trump “does talk about” Cricket’s demise, and claimed that the story helped her pitch herself to her boss as a hard-edged protector of the US.
“When [Trump] asked me after he won the election if I would be interested in being in his Cabinet, what position I would be interested in, I asked for Homeland Security,” she recounted.
“He said, ‘I didn’t know you would be interested in that. Why would you be interested in it?’ I said, ‘Sir, because you’re gonna have to have somebody who’s tough enough to do it.’”
Noem said she also impressed upon Trump, 79, that it would be helpful to have a mother and grandmother in charge to help communicate concerns about illegal immigration to families across the country.
“‘It will impact families and you’ll need somebody who can talk about it and that will visit with the American people about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and that will go out and tell the stories of all the victims and tell stories of how it’s endangering our national security,’” Noem recalled telling Trump in her pitch.
“At the end of the day,” she concluded, “the work that we do today is about our kids.”
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