Kristi Noem

US politician Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota and potential vice president to Donald Trump, is facing backlash after admitting in her memoir that she shot a dog and a goat.

The memoir titled “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward” will be released on May 7.

An excerpt from the book acquired by The Guardian revealed that Noem’s 14-month-old dog, a female wirehaired pointer named Cricket, had an aggressive personality.

She wrote about the struggles she faced with the dog, including how Cricket was untrainable, at one point escaping and wreaking havoc in a chicken farm.

Noem reportedly described the “dangerous” dog as a “picture of pure joy” as she “grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

According to the excerpt, when Noem tried to calm the dog down, Cricket whipped around to bite her. At that moment, Noem realized she had to put the dog down. “I hated that dog,” she writes. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

She lured the dog to a gravel pit where she shot it. Noem reportedly killed a “disgusting, musky, rancid” goat her family owned as well. She dragged the animal into the same gravel pit and shot him too — but the “nasty and mean” goat survived its first gunshot. Noem went back to her truck, reloaded, and shot him again.

The American politician apparently told that story in the book to illustrate that “difficult, messy and ugly” things sometimes have to be done in life and in politics, according to The Guardian. Sharing a link to the article on social media, she wrote: “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.”

@TheRickWilson wrote that he has hunted with bird dogs and hunting dogs for decades, saying: “She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog.

“We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She is sleeping on the couch.” @PathlessPilgrim wrote that the act was “unforgivable,” and added: “That she would then write about it in her book is frankly astonishing and shows a level of disconnect totally unacceptable in a politician.”