She may need to see a specialist to figure out if she should be committed, but I don’t think anyone could prove she broke a law.

Can we just say she’s dangerous and untrainable? Just a thought…

That’s kind of the point of the article I linked to. Yeah, everyone is upset about Cricket, but the goat matters too.

Right, so it doesn’t matter what Noem did, because there is already so much cruelty out there? Why are people defending her cruelty by pointing out the existence of institutional cruelty? They are both bad. One does not refute the other.

So because there are institutional scale cruelties like this, then it doesn’t matter that a person in a position high in the American government is bragging about her personal cruelty to animals? I am simply pointing out her failings in this regard and you are telling me what? It doesn’t matter what she did because there’s already a lot of cruelty out there?

Sadly, I am. There are laws about how the animals can be put down and though they are not what I would want them to be, they do at least somewhat limit the cruelty inherent in the process.

The point isn’t the killing of the animal. It’s the method and needless suffering involved. Taking pot shots at them until they’re dead is a little beyond the pale.

Here is another article that takes a more detailed take about what she bragged about in her book. It also focuses more on the legal aspects, pointing out that her killing of the goat appears to have violated the states animal cruelty laws. If nothing else, the details about this give a clear, and disturbing view into the type of person she is.

“Walking back up to the yard, I spotted our billy goat,” Noem wrote.

The nameless goat’s only sin in that moment was being in Noem’s field of view.

In the book, Noem tried to justify her snap decision to kill the goat by writing that it “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them,” leaving them “terrified.” The animal also had a “wretched smell.”

But apparently none of that had been a big enough problem to do anything about it. Not until Noem got angry enough to kill a dog and decided she needed to kill again.

Noem says she “dragged” the goat to the gravel pit, “tied him to a post,” and shot at him. But the goat jumped when she shot.

“My shot was off and I needed one more shell to finish the job,” she wrote.

She studiously avoided saying she wounded the goat with the first shot, but that’s the implication.

“Not wanting him to suffer,” she added — apparently experiencing her first twinge of feeling, after saying that killing the dog was not “pleasant” — “I hustled back across the pasture to the pickup, grabbed another shell, hurried back to the gravel pit, and put him down.”

…

In reality, what Noem did to the goat — dragging it to a gravel pit, tying it to a post, shooting at it once, leaving to get another shell, and shooting it again — sounds an awful lot like the legal definition of animal cruelty. That definition in South Dakota law is “to intentionally, willfully, and maliciously inflict gross physical abuse on an animal that causes prolonged pain, that causes serious physical injury, or that results in the death of the animal.”

One would clearly take that assessment far more seriously in the republicans though. Cricket was a 14-month old puppy and would very probably have matured into a trainable companion animal. Something that could never happen with a republican.

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Think I’ll pass on this site.

They come across as psychopaths…

Yep. Studies have shown that corporate CEOs have a much higher chance of having psychopathic traits than the general population.