If South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem had asked me for advice I would have told her that under no circumstances should she write about how she once shot her farm dog because he killed livestock and bit humans.

Some things should be left unrecorded.

Not because the acts themselves are so raw. But because many animal lovers lose their minds when confronted with rural reality. 

For instance, many animal lovers eat meat but never want to know what the delightful last minutes are like in the life of a terrified pig, chicken or steer. Or how pleasant that ride to the slaughterhouse might be in the suffocating heat, packed into a truck like cord wood. 

Hey, we hire someone else to do our wet work, so it doesn't count as cruelty.

One memorable column that I wrote for the Virginian-Pilot filled the letters to the editor page with steaming diatribes and caused other readers to indignantly cancel their subscriptions: in it I confessed that when I found a nearly dead baby bird - covered with insects - in my yard I put it in a sealed Ziplok bag to put it out of its suffering.

Judging from the reaction of  Pilot readers you would have thought I set the little bird on fire and stomped on it. I was accused of being a bird murderer and told I belonged in jail.

Apparently readers expected me to perform CPR on the gasping animal.

Back to Governor Noem. The comely 53-year-old governor of South Dakota didn’t ask my advice, so in her latest book, “No Going Back,” she confesses that she shot her incorrigible dog “Cricket” that wouldn’t hunt anything but a neighbor’s chickens and that bit her when she went to pull him off.

Not everyone could load a rifle, point it at a dog and pull the trigger. Shoot, I couldn’t do it and I’m an infamous exterminator of baby birds.

I’m an unabashed dog lover and feel guilty if I raise my voice to my little Welsh terrorist, who would at times try the patience of Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer.

Still, farm life is not suburban or city life and in the country people often take matters into their own hands instead of hiring an intermediary. Kristi Noem was raised on a South Dakota ranch.

Oh, and if your dog is raiding the neighbors hen house, you can expect to hear a gunshot. That’s legal in lots of places, including South Dakota.

Here in suburbia, bad dogs are surrendered  to shelters where they’re tossed in a cage. If they’re not adopted, they’re given the needle. Apparently that is less heartless than shooting them.

Who knew?

I’m not defending Noem - I don’t plan to read her book, so I’ll be spared the jolt of reading about Cricket’s fate - just acknowledging that farmers don't necessarily have the same relationship with their farm animals that we have with our pets. They also put down their own ailing and aging animals

Pundits spent Sunday calling Noem “sick,” “cruel” and “heartless” after the excerpt from her book leaked. They reckon she just blew any chance she had to run as Donald Trump’s veep. In an opinion piece on CNN headlined “Kristi Noem might have underestimated the decency of dog lovers” Dean Obeidallah expressed revulsion over the shooting and predicted that dog lovers across the nation would share his reaction:

I found the passage of “No Going Back” in which Noem describes killing Cricket revolting, and I imagine most people among the estimated 65 million households that own a dog (and many who don’t) feel the same way.

A 2023 Pew poll found that 97% of people with pets view them as a member of the family. That, however, apparently was not how Noem viewed Cricket.

I doubt she was really in the running to be Trump’s v.p. anyway. Noem’s from a sparsely populated red state and I’m not sure what she’d bring to the ticket.

But if animal lovers think that shooting a bad dog is stomach-turning wait till they find out what happens to babies during an abortion.