Anybody been following this Kristi Noem thing? BLUF: Terrible idea by her and her team.
I mean, I get the "this is how rural folks live" thing. I think we've even had past members here talk about shooting their dog, but like when it had a terminal illness or something, and I know that some here would shoot a dog being aggressive towards them (she shot the dog because it was aggressive/"untrainable", not during an immediate threat).
Though I'm one of the "dogs are better than people" people here, I understand why someone might shoot a loose dog that was an immediate threat to them. I even kinda get why someone rural might do what Noem did. After all, cops will shoot an "aggressive" dog. Animal Control will confiscate an "aggressive" dog from you and kill it. I think Noem's point was that she was doing the rural equivalent of what cops or local government would do in the city. A bunch of my neighbors talk about shooting stray dogs (because "cattle country"), which always has me worried about keeping Steve within his own AO. It's something I could never do. I've had stray dogs wander on the property, and I've just let them pass. Even if one came on and started going at my cow guy's cows, I'd just go out in the field and chase him off. That's just me.
Regardless, who the heck told her that making this a main point of her book/book tour was a good idea? This is an easy room to read. The vast, vast majority of Americans love dogs, and whether their position is right or wrong on it, they think that someone shooting their own dog is abhorrent. That's simply current culture. She is super upset about everyone jumping down her throat on it, but I'm not sure what else she expected. I posted in politics because this seems to be a major political blunder to her career.