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      Kristi Noem dogged by poor polling amid fallout from tale of killing puppy

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      Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, saw polling numbers plummet after the Guardian revealed that she writes in a new book about the day she shot dead a hunting dog and an un-castrated goat, a revelation that ignited a political storm.Announcing what it called its “Noem Puppy Murder Poll Findings”, New River Strategies, a Democratic firm, said 81% of Americans disapproved of Noem’s decision to shoot Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer who Noem says ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens, thereby earning a trip to a gravel pit to die.According to Noem’s account, the goat, which Noem did not name, followed Cricket to the pit because Noem deemed his odour and behaviour unacceptable on her farm. By Noem’s own detailed admission, it took two blasts from a shotgun, separated by a walk back to her truck for more shells, to finish the goat off.Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in May. The Guardian obtained a copy.The governor’s extraordinary admission made news because she has long been seen to be auditioning to be picked for vice-president by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.On Friday, amid widespread disbelief that Noem chose to tell such a horrific story in such detail in a campaign book, most observers thought her chances of winning the Trump veepstakes were over.Wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative pundit whose father, John McCain, in 2008 made one of the most disastrous vice-presidential picks of all time, in the form of extremist Sarah Palin: “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc – but not from killing a dog.“All I will distinctly think about Kristi Noem now is that she murdered a puppy who was ‘acting up’ – which is obviously cruel and insane. Good luck with that VP pick[,] lady.”According to New River Strategies: “While 37% of Republicans are still not sure if [Noem] would be a good choice, 84% of them report liking or loving dogs – not a promising sign.”Fourteen percent of respondents to the poll still thought Noem would be a good choice for vice-president to Trump. Among Republicans, 21% thought Noem would be a good pick, to 42% who did not.Among self-identified “very conservative voters”, 28% said Noem would be a good choice, against 32% who said she would not.New River noted: “A plurality of Americans who do not like dogs still disapprove of the governor’s action. While 87% of Americans who love dogs disapprove of what the governor did, so too do 48% of Americans who do not care for the animals.”Politico, which reported the New River poll, also noted Noem had fallen in a ranking of potential Trump running mates offered by PredictIt, an online betting firm.By Saturday, Noem had fallen from second, behind Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, to fourth, also behind Elise Stefanik, the New York representative, and Tulsi Gabbard, a former representative and Democratic presidential hopeful whose own campaign book, out on Tuesday, does not contain any scenes of shooting puppies.Noem responded to reports about her book by saying: “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” She added that her family recently put down three horses.Her communications director, Ian Fury, cited polling showing Noem as the only potential Trump vice-presidential pick with a positive favourability rating in four battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“This is why the liberal media is so eager to attack Kristi Noem,” Fury said. “She’s the potential running mate they fear most.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll from Kaplan Strategies, which describes itself as bipartisan, was conducted the previous weekend but released on Friday, the day the Guardian broke the story of Noem, Cricket the dog and the unnamed goat.On Saturday, the Guardian attempted to contact public figures whose glowing recommendations of Noem’s book are printed on its jacket and introductory pages.In his blurb, Trump calls Noem “a tremendous leader, one of the best”, adding: “This book, it’s a winner … you’ve got to read it!”Asked whether Trump had read the whole book before recommending it, and whether he had comment about the controversy over Noem’s tale of killing domestic animals, the former president’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, did not immediately respond.Fox News spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rachel Campos-Duffy, a host whose quote on Noem’s book salutes her “common sense and fearless fight for freedom”, adding: “Get ready to be inspired!”No Going Back is also blurbed by Chaya Raichik, creator of the trolling Libs of TikTok social media account; James Golden, also known as Bo Snerdley, formerly sidekick to the late rightwing shock jock Rush Limbaugh; and Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who campaigns against transgender participation in women’s sports.By Saturday, Raichik had not commented about Noem’s dog-killing confession. Snerdley had reposted a Daily Mail version of the Guardian report.Gaines, who calls Noem’s book “the perfect blueprint for young Americans on how to move our nation forward”, did not comment on the controversy over Noem’s decision to kill a 14-month-old dog. She did, however, post a video of eight puppies sleeping in a pile on a pink rug.“The pups have arrived!” she wrote. “Be still my heart.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book

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      In 1952, as a Republican candidate for vice-president, Richard Nixon famously stirred criticism by admitting receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift.In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.But in 2024 Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own.“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished.Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”In what may prove a contender for the greatest understatement of election year, Noem adds: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” More

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      in Elections

      What Makes Tiny ‘Water Bears’ So Tough? They Quickly Fix Broken DNA.

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      New research finds that microscopic tardigrades are remarkably good at repairing their DNA after a huge blast of radiation.To introduce her children to the hidden marvels of the animal kingdom a few years ago, Anne De Cian stepped into her garden in Paris. Dr. De Cian, a molecular biologist, gathered bits of moss, then came back inside to soak them in water and place them under a microscope. Her children gazed into the eyepiece at strange, eight-legged creatures clambering over the moss.“They were impressed,” Dr. De Cian said.But she was not finished with the tiny beasts, known as tardigrades. She brought them to her laboratory at the French National Museum of Natural History, where she and her colleagues hit them with gamma rays. The blasts were hundreds of times greater than the radiation required to kill a human being. Yet the tardigrades survived, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened.Scientists have long known that tardigrades are freakishly resistant to radiation, but only now are Dr. De Cian and other researchers uncovering the secrets of their survival. Tardigrades turn out to be masters of molecular repair, able to quickly reassemble piles of shattered DNA, according to a study published on Friday and another from earlier this year.Scientists have been trying to breach the defenses of tardigrades for centuries. In 1776, Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian naturalist, described how the animals could dry out completely and then be resurrected with a splash of water. In the subsequent decades, scientists found that tardigrades could withstand crushing pressure, deep freezes and even a trip to outer space.In 1963, a team of French researchers found that tardigrades could withstand massive blasts of X-rays. In more recent studies, researchers have found that some species of tardigrades can withstand a dose of radiation 1,400 times higher than what’s required to kill a person.A preflight photo of a marine tardigrade as seen magnified by 40 times under a light microscope.Boothby Lab/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Monkey Who Escaped in Scotland is Captured

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      A Japanese macaque escaped from a wildlife park on Sunday. After five days of “living his best life,” he was back home on Thursday.A Japanese macaque was spotted in a man’s backyard after it escaped from Highland Wildlife Park in Scotland.Carl Nagle, via StoryfulEver since the breakout, the people of Kingussie have been following the whereabouts of a fugitive in the Scottish highlands.There he was, breaking into a backyard to scoop up some food as a couple filmed in shock. A drone spotted him from above, stalking underneath the branches of a tree. Some cheered him on in his bid for freedom; others were simply impressed he had managed to elude his finders for so long.But on Thursday the search was over: Animal keepers finally captured a monkey days after he broke out of his enclosure in Highland Wildlife Park.The Japanese macaque, who some had nicknamed “Kingussie Kong,” was caught and tranquilized Thursday morning, after a member of public called a hotline to report it was eating from a bird feeder in their garden. “The monkey is on the way back to the park with our keepers, where he will be looked over by one of our vet team,” said Keith Gilchrist, an operations manager at the Highland Wildlife Park in a statement, adding that he would be reintroduced to the park’s troop. The monkey’s real name, he added, was Honshu. It was the denouement to a whirlwind that had engulfed — or at least amused — the communities of Kingussie and Kincraig in the Scottish highlands, where about 1,500 humans live. Since the macaque went on the lam, his fate had drawn reporters who waited nearby for updates on the monkey’s location.“Everybody is rooting for this monkey,” said Carl Nagle, a Kincraig resident who spotted the monkey on Sunday in his backyard, apparently snacking on even more birdfeed. “He must be having a ball living his best life.”For his part, Mr. Nagle said he was “hugely relieved,” that the monkey was caught, saying that he needed to return to his troop. “It’s been five weird and wonderful days.”He wondered if the monkey knew it was time to call the gambit off, given that members of the national press were gathered near the park. “This is ridiculous — and yet it is somehow perfect,” Mr. Nagle said.“He’s going to go home and we’re all going to look at each other and go: Why are we here?”The Japanese macaque, also called the snow monkey, is native to Japan, where its population has recovered in recent years. Park authorities had warned the public to report sightings and not approach the animal, and to keep sources of food inside, but added that he was not “presumed dangerous.” He had been one of a troop of more than 30 animals at Highland Wildlife Park, and park officials had told the BBC that the monkey may have run away after tensions during breeding season. More

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      in Elections

      More Than 100 Animals Seized From Long Island Home

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      Animal welfare authorities say the animals were being illegally held and included a South American ostrich, a giant African snail, two prairie dogs and an endangered tiger salamander.Animal welfare authorities seized more than 100 animals from a Long Island home this week — including a South American ostrich, a giant African snail, two prairie dogs and an endangered tiger salamander — after a tip they received about exotic animals led them to their owner’s doorstep.“He was running a pop-up circus,” said Detective Matt Roper, director of law enforcement for the Nassau County SPCA. “Bringing these animals out in public and letting children play with these animals.”Detective Roper said the animals’ owner was given court summonses for several state and local violations, including endangering the public and housing and possessing endangered species. Federal authorities are also investigating, he said.Detective Roper emphasized that there were no signs that the animals had been abused or neglected.“They were all cared for,” Detective Roper said. “They were just in violation of being held or kept as either pets or for exhibition purposes.”Detective Roper, who declined to name the animals’ owner because the investigation is continuing, said that on Tuesday the authorities took 104 animals from the basement and backyard of the house, which is in North Bellmore.Humane Long Island, an animal advocacy organization that took custody of dozens of the animals that were seized, identified their owner as Matthew Spohrer, 32. He was issued 30 violations relating to illegal possession of animals, the group said in a news release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in US Politics

      ‘It’s always down to human failure’: President Biden, this is how to stop your dog biting people

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      Perhaps the name didn’t help in establishing who’s boss. When Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, were given a three-month-old German shepherd puppy in December 2021, they decided to call the “very adorable” new pet Commander.With his “in chief” suffix, Biden may technically outrank him – but it seems nobody told the dog. On Monday Commander (dog not president) bit a Secret Service agent, leaving him requiring medical treatment – and this was not a first offence. The dog has bitten or attacked Secret Service personnel at least 11 times, which among Biden’s security team has earned it the less polite code names of “that stupid dog” and “freaking clown”.After the last attack in July, America’s first couple introduced “additional leashing protocols and training”, the White House announced, but given Biden’s other German shepherd, Major, was given away to family friends after biting incidents of his own, it seems something is up with the presidential pooches.Clearly the president is a busy man, but as well as the other minor matters on his plate, he is responsible for his pet’s bad behaviour, according to dog experts. “With dog bites, it’s always down to human failure,” says Luke Balsam, who runs dog training programmes at his London-based firm Luke’s Dog School.Dogs will very rarely bite without first having first shown escalating signs of stress or warning such as staring, standing defensively and growling, Balsam says. To reach the biting stage, humans have failed to spot these signs, and failed to change whatever is causing the dog stress.“Most aggression that we see in dogs comes from fear. It’s not being happy with something and having to escalate their own behaviour because the environment is not changing.”In the case of the White House, he says, “you’ve got an environment where there are people in and out all the time, probably some people are running, different people all the time, at different times of the day. It’s constant change. And so the dogs can be like: ‘Oh, who’s this? Why is this person running? What’s going on here?’”Fellow trainer Dima Yeremenko agrees, and says that while there can be a place for muzzles, there are other ways to manage a dog that is repeatedly biting, such as keeping them in a calmer restricted area, taking them back to a familiar place after exercise and using “command control” to set limits.“Put in a new environment, they can learn to behave appropriately. But that depends on the lifestyle of the person who is conducting the process. If you are simply a disorganised person surrounded by chaos, it will eventually lead to disaster,” he says.Above all, it’s not the fault of the breed, stress devotees of German shepherds. Originally bred to herd sheep, they are not naturally aggressive and are “very loyal, easy to train and very intelligent”, says Katrina Stevens, a Kennel Club assured breeder in Wiltshire for almost 40 years.“That also means they can learn bad things just as quickly as good things,” she says. “So they need a calm, confident owner.” Not so different, really, from the other parts of the president’s job. More

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      Trump falsely claims wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them ‘batty’

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      Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.”“They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and reality TV host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”Trump has a history of making false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little to support Trump’s foray into whale science.“He displays an astonishing lack of knowledge of whales and whale strandings,” said Andrew Read, a whale researcher and commissioner of the Marine Mammal Commission, of Trump. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”The US has been slow, compared with other countries, to develop offshore wind farms but several projects are now under way off the east coast, enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden as a way to boost clean energy supply and combat the climate crisis.Critics of this push, including some environmentalists, have warned that whales are being imperiled by work to install these new offshore turbines, but scientists have largely dismissed these claims. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted.Read said that there are some “broad concerns” about the overall industrialization of the oceans, but that the main threats to whales come from their being hit by boats and becoming entangled in fishing gear, and from warming oceans due to the climate change.“The population of humpback whales, in particular, is recovering from being hunted and they are coming closer to the coast to feed on prey, which means they are being hit as they come into shipping lanes, or being caught up in nets,” said Read.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spate of dead whales that washed up along New York and New Jersey’s coasts earlier this year has fueled opposition to wind turbines, however, with Republicans in New Jersey attempting to halt construction of turbines.This opposition has been embraced not only as another culture war battle but also as a way to help businesses keen to stymie clean energy, with several rightwing groups funded by fossil fuel interests linked to seemingly organic community protests against wind farms.“It’s particularly sad to see well-meaning people who care about whales being persuaded that wind turbines are a risk to them,” said Read. “They are being manipulated by fossil fuel interests who see wind energy as a threat to those interests.” More

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      ‘Not accurate’: Republican wrong to say Montana has more bears than people

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      In the compendium of false claims, an offering from Tim Sheehy, a Montana 2024 Republican Senate candidate, is readily disprovable.In an interview with Breitbart, the former Navy Seal observed that the state, which he referred to as “flyover country”, did not typically have much in political power – a situation that could change with the balance of power in the US Senate races next year.“This is a state where there’s not a lot of people,” Sheehy observed. “There’s more cows than people, there’s more bears than people, and we’re not used to having a lot of political clout.”His assessment about cattle is observably correct. There are estimated to be 2.2 million head in the state this year, according to Department of Agriculture estimates, down from 2.5 million in 2021. The number of people is put at 1.12 million, according to the US Census Bureau.But Sheehy’s estimate for bear – grizzly and black – is wildly off, notwithstanding that bears don’t respect state boundaries and aren’t easy to count – particularly outside of national parks.Molly Parks, a carnivore coordinator with Montana’s fish, wildlife and parks (FWP), said there weren’t good numbers for the bear population. A 2011 study put the number of black bears in the state at 13,307 and those numbers are in the process of being updated. Separately, the FWP told the Daily Montanan in July the state had more than 2,100 grizzly bears.“We definitely don’t have more bears than people in the state,” Parks told the Guardian. “It’s not accurate at all. We have somewhere close to a million people in the state and nowhere close to that number of bear.”Parks suggested Sheehy’s statement should be read with humor.But bears are probably on the minds of Montanans after a series of encounters. A female grizzly bear that fatally mauled a woman on a forest trail west of Yellowstone national park in July and attacked a person in Idaho three years ago was killed earlier this month after it broke into a house near West Yellowstone.A hunter was severely injured in a grizzly attack near Big Sky earlier this month. A week later, a hunter near Fairfield shot and injured a grizzly. Neither of the wounded bears was found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe human population in bear strongholds in south-west Montana has escalated by up to a third during the past decade, and has led to grizzly bears getting into increasing conflicts with humans.FWP put out a news release last week warning visitors that staff had confirmed grizzly bear sightings throughout the state, “particularly in areas between the Northern Continental Divide and the Great Yellowstone ecosystems”.If nothing else, Sheehy may have been drawing attention to September’s bear aware month, established by a proclamation issued by Governor Greg Gianforte to encourage safe recreation in bear country. More