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Stephen Colbert has mocked and attacked the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, after the Trump-supporting politician confessed in her new memoir to killing a puppy.
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert host, 59, told viewers on Monday (29 April) night: “If you like puppies, you’re not going to like Kristi Noem.”
Noem, 52, writes in her forthcoming memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward that she once decided to shoot her own dog.
“Now, I know that sounds terrible, but it’s much worse,” said Colbert. “Because this wasn’t some rabid, 90lb hell hound on a meth bender.” In fact, the dog in question was a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket.
“It is worth pointing out: no one made Noem confess to puppy-snuffing,” Colbert added. “She volunteered this information,” even saying: ‘I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.’”
Noem has defended her decision by saying that Cricket was “untrainable”, an argument to which Colbert responded by saying: “Well yeah! She was 14 months old!”
Noem writes in her book that she had taken Cricket on a pheasant hunt and that the puppy ruined the hunt by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
Colbert observed: “But who among us hasn’t seen a dog running through the fields, not a care in the world, and thought ‘you deserve to die.’”
On the way home, Noem says Cricket attacked her neighbour’s chickens.
“Governor Noem, if you don’t like untrainable animals that wolf down chicken, I have bad news about your party’s nominee,” Colbert joked.
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Noem, who is of the candidates in the running to be Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President, also wrote that Cricket was “the picture of pure joy” after attacking the chickens. The Republican politician observed: “I hated that dog.”
Colbert commented: “This book is starting to sound less like a political memoir and more like the scrawled manifesto of a guy whose neighbors said, ‘He just kinda kept to himself, you know?’”
As well as killing Cricket, Noem also recalled that she shot a goat for smelling bad, leading Colbert to ask: “Oh my God, what kind of reverse John Wick farm is she running out there?”
After the story initially went viral on social media, Noem told her followers on X that “tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm”.
When criticism continued, Noem doubled down on her decision.
“I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book,” Noem wrote on Sunday.
She continued: “The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown some aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did.”
