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GOP senator compares Kristi Noem's DHS leadership to that time she shot her own dog
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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LOL, but she was just describing rural life, something no liberals could possibly ever know or understand. Sometimes you just have to shoot your dog in the face, and because you already have your bloodlust going, you have to shoot your goat, too.
I mean, there are just no other options for rural livin'. It's nasty stuff that requires a cool and calm rational mind and no liberals could ever, ever understand, because no liberals ever existed outside the Big City.
Damn those Big City libs. Life ain't all commuting like a commie and making money by jackin it at a desk in front of the secretary. In the real world, ya can't just be a chickenshit little bitch afraid to get dirt under yer nails. Ya gotta do the right thing and make hard decisions!
Do ya shoot the dog, or do ya shoot the neighbor's dog? Do ya claim he was vicious and untrainable, or do ya blame it on rabies? Do ya use the ol' reliable glock, or do ya take the hard work to pull the good stuff and grab the semi-auto from the truck? Libs--they just don't hafta make those kinds of choices!
lots of conjectures and assumptions. none of which is true. Rural != Cruel or Irresponsible. Read any book from a reputable modern farmer and then you'll understand. Has nothing to do with liberal. Most books are written by individuals self identified as conservative or libertarian. Shirking your responsibility and killing an animal 'cause you felt so is insane. I don't know a single farmer who'd do such thing and I know more than few.
Pretty sure you just ate the onion
love them onions 😁
I get that you're mocking her, but genuinely sometimes, when you're particularly rural, you do in fact have to shoot a dog.
Where I grew up, there was no animal control. There was no one to call if there were loose animals. Combine that with the fact that it was an area where people would just dump unwanted animals, and we had a real feral dog problem.
When you have dangerous dogs show up a couple of times a month, and your only other option to get rid of them is to try and catch them, load them up in a crate, drive them an hour into town, just to give them to a pound that's gonna put them down anyway; yeah, sometimes you kinda don't have much other option but to shoot them.
My dad put down a good few dogs when I was young. It wasn't something he liked doing. But when you have young kids running around, you can't just let a bunch of feral dogs run loose.
What should he have done? What was the "correct" decision for him to make?
Edit: Not defending Noam here. Her story about shooting her dog has a lot more wrong with it than simply shooting the dog. She's a monster.
this wasn’t a feral dog. It was a young dog that she had not trained for hunting, which she took on a hunt and it got anxious so she shot it.
Did you not see the part where I said I wasn't defending Noam and that what she did wasn't what I'm describing?
Two things can be true. Noam can be a bad person, and people in rural areas can, unfortunately, sometimes have to put down feral dogs.
I grew up in an extremely rural area. We had a dog that roamed a lot, just like so many dogs in the area (well, except for the weird people that would just tie up their dog outside their house for whatever reason).
Anyway, local dogs would sometimes get together and try to chase deer. Apparently, one of our neighbors recognized our dog on one of these escapades. Someone he was with was about to shoot our dog for chasing deer and he stopped it. After that, we made a lot more efforts to keep him on our property.
There was no animal control and people were especially precious about being able to hunt deer, so dogs that took to chasing deer down in groups tended to be at-risk.
Now I'm just curious where you lived that there was no shelter to take unwanted dogs to. That's what we did and I'm originally from BFE.
Here in my area, of rural east Texas, the only safe shelters for dogs, that I know about, are already at capacity and cannot take new ones.
I’m all for finding homes for stray dogs or even having people feed community strays.
But life is complicated and there are no nice options to deal with some dogs who pack up and become a menace.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in East Texas as well, probably an hour and a half into Texas from Shreveport. I can say this has been true since at least the 80s that I'm aware of. It's not "lol, can't train 'em gotta put 'em down!" and more "I guess I could call the sheriff and he'll come out and maybe accidentally shoot my dog along with this pack of aggressive, possibly diseased animals who may be gone in the half hour it'll take him to get here or I can make sure my dog and kid are safe." I guess there was also "I'll go ahead and risk my life and start the treatment for rabies and try to catch this pack of feral animals and take them to Dallas where I'm sure the second I turn my back they're going to be put down because they've been out here killing and that's all they know."
We had wandering strays that never caused a problem. We did have a problem with meth heads dumping failed fighting dogs. The only time it got to be a real gray area was when you weren't sure whether a dog had a disease that caused balance issues or if one had just tangled with a wild animal and was hurt. But a hurt dog is also a dangerous dog and you're still running up against waiting half an hour for a sheriff that might show up blasting every animal in sight whether it's gone or not and possibly having your family hurt.
Life is complicated. And it sucks. And some of us are just out here doing the best we know how. Except Kristi Noem apparently who hated that dog and didn't care for it or train it properly, blamed the dog for her failure, then decided she also hated a goat, missed the kill shot, and had planned so poorly that she had to go reload and come back for round 2. That's fucking incompetence and spite, not protecting her kids and her neighbor's chickens. Luckily she surely won't bring that kind of incompetence and hatefulness to any job she might do with the government. Surely not, no way.
I grew up on 150 acres in a very rural part of the Southern US.
This could also be an age thing though. There is now a county animal control and some animal shelters. That wasn't true in the early 90s.
But the area has grown a bunch since then too. What used to be farmland for ages has started to turn into suburbs and subdivisions. I'm sure what I've described is still pretty normative in places that are still underdeveloped.