After South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, proudly admitted in a forthcoming memoir to marching her young puppy Cricket to a gravel pit to kill her with a shotgun, she rationalized the despicable act by arguing that Cricket had been aggressive.
She also said that she used the same gravel pit to shoot a “disgusting, musky, rancid” unnamed goat – but botched the job, leaving the goat to suffer unnecessarily while she rushed to her truck to get a second shell. (It’s unclear why Noem, supposedly a shrewd outdoorswoman, didn’t think to carry more shells on her.)
Noem has defended her story by proclaiming that Americans want “leaders who are authentic”. It’s a bad excuse. It’s also untrue, because Noem, like so many other political firebrands who are infiltrating and redefining the Republican party, is anything but authentic.
Her political brand is simply a veneer – a fake, stylized brand of dangerous Trump Republicanism whose moral roots are about as deep as a bad facelift. This brand not only fails what used to be the Republican party; it is also destroying and dividing the US, and it’s more evident than ever here in the American west.
In Montana, the Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, has a registered cattle brand, yet he owns no cattle. He takes agricultural tax exemptions on his luxury estate in Bozeman even though he doesn’t do much serious ranching or farming.
In 2021, Gianforte illegally shot and killed a collared Yellowstone wolf that had its leg caught in a steel-jawed trap. He wanted to stuff the wolf and display it in his office – presumably without its radio collar, which would have dampened the effect he was going for.
Then, after realizing he didn’t have the proper training certification to shoot a live animal stuck in a trap for what could have been days, Gianforte tried to lie to investigators about shooting it. If this sounds familiar, it is; in 2017 Gianforte also misled police officers after body-slamming a Guardian reporter.
Yet Gianforte wants his constituents to believe he is, somehow, a fair-chase hunter – a rugged, tough-guy Montanan, even though he spent most of his life in front of a computer screen in the Philadelphia suburbs. In Montana, we have a more accurate word for people like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem: posers.
Real hunters, real gun enthusiasts, real bird dog owners – “real Americans”, to use a phrase so often invoked by the Republican party – know that politicians like Gianforte and Noem are phoneys. They’re trying to create fake versions of themselves to publicly demonstrate their capacity for cruelty and extremism without being bothered by any responsibility or morality.
I’ve sold millions of guns in my career as a former firearms executive, but I am no longer a Republican. That’s because I stood up for what I believed in when I saw things take a turn for the worse. I left what I considered a dream job because of a lack of responsibility and morality in the gun industry.
I’m still, however, very much a hunter. Since I was a kid, I’ve owned and rigorously trained bird dogs like the one Noem killed. I have three today. One of them is Aldo, a German wire-haired pointer just like Cricket.
These dogs are exceptional companions whose strong prey drive means they need daily exercise and training; I’ve spent hundreds of days hiking and shooting and hunting with my dogs. All bird dog owners know this, and Noem has no excuse. If neither Kristi Noem nor Greg Gianforte have the patience, responsibility or moral compass when it comes to basic decency to animals, they lack the fundamental decency needed to govern a state.
Real hunters are sickened about what Gianforte and Noem did because we understand our social compact. We know that real fair-chase hunting relies on a tightly woven fabric of self-enforced ethics, respect for our wildlife and the stewardship of the animals who have, for millennia, stood by our side – pets like the one Noem executed in a gravel pit with a shotgun because she was “untrainable”.
If Noem applies this kind of reasoning to her job, and we must assume she does, no wonder South Dakota’s economy has plunged to among the worst in the nation since she took office.
If Gianforte believes “fair-chase” hunting is shooting a collared animal stuck in a trap, no wonder that under his tenure, starting teacher salary in our state has fallen to 51st in the nation (that’s right, a territory beat us!). No wonder his approval rating is at a miserable 37%. No wonder he couldn’t be bothered to explain why the property taxes on his privately owned home went down last year, while virtually everyone else around him got a tax hike.
For years, responsible, reasonable people in the west have seethed at the unabashed theft of our societal goodwill by posers like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem.
There is no good that comes from the devastating story of Cricket’s demise, or the wolf that wandered out of Yellowstone only to get caught in a trap until Greg Gianforte showed up with a gun.
But at least now the rest of the nation can see the dangers of electing these phonies.
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Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive, is a Democratic candidate running to become Montana’s next governor