‘This is not a drill’: Dogs encouraged to seek shelter after Trump gives Kristi Noem a key role in his administration

Last week, the United States resigned the history books of the future to some particularly dystopian chapters after Donald Trump was elected as the 47th president of the United States alongside running-mate JD Vance. And now, the footnotes have begun, with Trump having selected one Kristi Noem as his next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, per CNN.

Noem — a Trump loyalist who has served as South Dakota’s governor since 2019 — made unsavory waves earlier this year when it was revealed that she killed her family’s dog, Cricket, after the pooch proved to be untrainable as a hunting dog, killed two chickens belonging to a neighbor, and bit Noem when the governor tried to get her under control.

The canicidal anecdote came from Noem herself, who detailed the killing in her autobiography No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, which released in May earlier this year.

Ever since, folks from all over have reacted to most all news involving Noem with half-sincere concerns for the well-being of dogs. This time is no different.

Noem would later go on to defend her actions, suggesting that they’re emblematic of a person who’s willing to make the more gruesome and difficult choices when the situation calls for it. But let’s break this down. Briefly put, the Secretary of Homeland Security is responsible for ensuring all the functions of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are operating smoothly. This includes but is not limited to counterterrorism, cybersecurity, geographical security across the land, sea, and air, immigration law enforcement, and response to natural disasters. 15 offices report to the DHS Secretary, many of which deal with civil liberties and justice.

During Noem’s tenure as South Dakota’s governor, she linked the state’s Native American tribes to Mexican drug cartels in January 2024 (without proof), announced the deployment of the South Dakota National Guard to the United States’ southern border in June 2021 (which the South Dakota National Guard was later sued for by the Center for Public Integrity), abolished her state’s handgun permit requirement in 2019, and has heavily opposed the legalization of cannabis.

As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, she called for additional transparency over the country’s involvement in the 2011 Libyan civil war and supported Donald Trump’s 2017 suspension of the U.S. refugee program for 120 days, not to mention a ban on all travel to the U.S. for any national from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days.

But let’s put aside whatever experience she has that’s even tangentially relevant to someone in her new government position. This is a woman who thought that telling a story about shooting her dog — over the dog not being as cut out for hunting/farm life as she had hoped — would mark her as someone who’s willing to make hard decisions. What Noem seemingly failed to realize, however, is that decisions made out of anger and contempt for something not working the way you want it to, are not “hard decisions.” Hard decisions are hard precisely because of how compassion complicates them, not by how gruesome they are.

To that point, it would have been much harder for Noem to rehome Cricket than to just shoot her between the eyes, and Noem took the easy way out; an easy way out that was only so because of her lack of compassion for a dog that she hated. And now she’s in charge of Homeland Security. This is indeed not a drill.