Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, already under fire for killing her family’s 14-month-old dog and boasting about it, on Sunday took aim at another family’s pet: Commander, President Biden’s bite-prone German shepherd.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ms. Noem, a Republican, suggested that Commander, who was banished from the White House last fall after bloodying a number of Secret Service agents, should also have been put down.
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” she told her interviewer, Margaret Brennan. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”
Commander was sent to an undisclosed location after the Secret Service recorded 24 biting episodes involving him between October 2022 and July 2023, about half of which required medical attention.
Ms. Noem’s opinion of the proper way to have handled him emerged during the publicity ramp-up to the release of her memoir, “No Going Back,” which is to be published on Tuesday.
The South Dakota governor, who had been widely seen as a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, wrote in the book about a female wire-haired pointer named Cricket that she had hoped to use to hunt pheasant on her ranch. She said that the dog proved “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless” as a hunting dog — so she shot her in a gravel pit.
“I hated that dog,” Ms. Noem wrote.
She also alluded to Commander in elaborating on her decision to shoot Cricket: “A dog who bites is dangerous and unpredictable (are you listening, Joe Biden?) — especially if you are running a business where people interact with your dogs,” she wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the CBS interview, Ms. Noem sought to defend the killing of Cricket — and a goat she also shot the same day — as “a choice I made over 20 years ago” to “protect people.”
But in her book, she also nodded to the idea that Cricket may be in a better place, or perhaps a worse one. Imagining becoming president in 2025 and sending Mr. Biden’s dog to meet his maker, Ms. Noem added: “Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.”
