I think I’ve been on the road nearly every day this last week helping my oldest move to Brookings, taking my wife back to Spearfish, running child #4 to the Sioux Falls airport to return to DC, and working on campaign materials. Lots of windshield time to listen to what’s going on in the world, but not a lot of time to write about it. So, the big one in South Dakota related news..
Not sure that there are many people who haven’t heard about the Governor’s new book and the kerfuffle that’s arisen from the passage she wrote about a dog she made the decision to put down after it killed animals and turned to snap at her.
Noem’s book comes out in May. The Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem recounts the story of Cricket – a 14-month-old, wire-haired pointer – ruining a pheasant hunt and killing a neighbor’s chickens.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket tried to bite her, proving herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” says Noem, “I realized I had to put her down.”
And..
Noem defended her story on Friday, saying it demonstrated the harsh realities of rural life that only recently saw her family put down three horses too.
Read that here.
Farmer shoots dog that killed livestock. Despite all the pearl clutching attached to the reaction from people who are less rural than most South Dakotans, I don’t think it’s exactly a shocking headline in this state.
Whether or not is constitutes cruelty is a discussion we’ve actually had before, and not that terribly long ago, such as back in 2014 when the state’s current animal cruelty law was debated over raising it from a misdemeanor to a felony:
Sen. Larry Rhoden, R-Union Center, gave an example of an act he thinks should be legal but might be interpreted as a felony under the proposal: A neighbor of his killed his own dog with fencing pliers after the animal was caught killing another rancher’s sheep.
“It was humane,” Rhoden said. “The dog was killed instantly. But who interprets that?”
The proposed animal cruelty law includes, among a long list of exceptions, both “any humane killing of an animal” and “any reasonable action … for the destruction or control of an animal known to be dangerous.” Advocates of the bill told Rhoden those clauses would protect that rancher, though Rep. Anne Hajek, R-Sioux Falls, added that she doesn’t “feel really good about what (Rhoden’s neighbor) did.”
Read that here in the Argus Leader.
So, no. Not cruelty under South Dakota law. Not even close, despite the pronouncements of the on-line panels of judgement.
I might view it in a different lens, as in the last decade, I had a dog that exhibited vicious behavior. We treated it under advice of our vet. Training, anxiety meds. Nothing worked. After it had bitten our son for the second or third time, the last being kind of a nasty bite on across his stomach, we were out of solutions. Couldn’t rehome a vicious dog, humane society wouldn’t take it. Even our vet conceded that while they didn’t usually euthanize, they agreed to do so in this instance.
But I’m an urbanite. Had I been on a farm, I would concede that I might have taken a more expedient and hands-on approach, because that’s what those out in the country tend to do with their own animals. Although, unlike the example in legislative testimony, I don’t think I would have used fence pliers.
If a farmer or rancher’s animal is giving birth, they don’t necessarily call the vet. If one is sick, they might treat all sorts of things themselves. If an animal is killing or running down livestock.. well, historically, they also deal with that end of things themselves. It’s not something they’re proud of. It’s just handled.
Is that done less as time marches on? I would say so. Maybe. We could probably reduce the marginal or borderline cases further if our state actually had more veterinarians or a veterinary medicine program (currently 4 years at SDSU, then transfer to Minnesota to finish it) to turn out more of them.
I think we can all agree that we all like our dogs. But having had to make a far more sanitized version of the same decision with a problem animal, I can’t condemn someone living out on a farm for just dealing with it, as they have as long as there have been farmers & ranchers in the state.
As shocking as it may be to those on twitter and social media, sometimes farm stuff and dealing with animals isn’t pretty, but dealing with things directly does happen in South Dakota, and it’s just a fact of life that it happens.
