How South Dakota governor Kristi Noem upstaged a monkey torturer

(Beth Clifton collage)

Noem also upstaged the sentencing of paramedics who killed Elijah McClain, a fatal pit bull attack, & her own bloody wildlife bounty program

WASHINGTON D.C.––Two-term South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, widely considered to be the top contender to become Republican vice presidential candidate on former U.S. President Trump’s ticket seeking to regain the White House in November 2024, upstaged quite a lot to grab the animal news beat headlines on April 26, 2024.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Monkey torture video magnate gets four years

Baby monkey torture video producer and distributor David Christopher Noble, 48, of Prineville, Oregon, was on April 24, 2024 sentenced to serve 48 months in federal prison and three years’ on supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced.

“At the direction of David Noble and his co-conspirators,” hired in Indonesia, “the producers of these animal abuse videos not only killed monkeys but did so in a way that extended their pain and suffering as long as possible,” explained Nathan J. Lichvarcik, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Eugene and Medford branch offices.

Michael Macartney, 50, is facing related charges in Virginia, along with alleged female accomplice Nicole Devilbiss, 35.

Two more alleged female accomplices, Holly LeGresley, 37, of Kidderminster, and Adriana Orme, 55, of Upton-upon-Severn, are charged with related offenses in England.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Paramedics sentenced for Elijah McClain killing

In Brighton, Colorado, on the morning of April 26, 2024, District Court Judge Mark Warner sentenced former Aurora paramedic Jeremy Cooper to four years on probation, 14 months of work release, and 100 hours of community service for criminally negligent homicide, causing the death of vegetarian animal shelter volunteer Elijah McClain of Aurora on August 27, 2019, three days after Cooper injected McClain with an overdose of the sedative ketamine.

After McClain was detained without either reasonable or stated cause by former Aurora police officers Randy Roedema, Jason Rosenblatt and Nathan Woodyard, only steps from his front door, Cooper and fellow paramedic Peter Cichuniec “were called to the scene and injected McClain with a dose of ketamine appropriate for a 200-pound person, even though he weighed just 143 pounds.

Elijah McClain in the Aurora animal shelter.

Two others sent to prison

“McClain suffered a heart attack on the way to a hospital,” and never came out of an ensuing coma, explained CNN reporters Mallika Kallingal and Andi Babineau,

Warner in April 2024 sentenced Cichuniec, who actually ordered the overdose, to serve five years in prison.

Roedema, earlier convicted of criminally negligent homicide and assault, was sentenced to serve 14 months in prison. Rosenblatt and Woodyard were acquitted of all charges.

(See Five tried, 3 convicted for killing vegetarian shelter volunteer Elijah McClain.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Day opened with pit bull attack death

In Bronx, New York, April 26, 2024 began with the 3 a.m. discovery that Kaheem Robinson, 41, had been killed by his own recently adopted pit bull.

The case appears to have underscored the very points about Big Lies used to deceived adopters into acquiring pit bulls, unaware of the dangers they are putting themselves into, that ANIMALS 24-7 co-editor Beth Clifton made in her April 26, 204 article Pit Bulls: Truth or Consequences, posted only hours earlier.

ANIMALS 24-7 expects to report more about the Kaheem Robinson fatality as more information becomes available.

“No Going Back”

But Kristi Noem, as a twice elected state governor and anticipated nominee for the second highest office in the United States, managed to top all that with her newly published memoir No Going Back, reviewed first by Guardian breaking news editor and Washington D.C. correspondent Martin Pengelly.

“Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print,” Pengelly wrote, “Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies,” including her narrative of shooting Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer.

“She included her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says,” continued Pengelly, “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.

Ringneck pheasant. (Beth Clifton photo)

“Out of her mind with excitement”

“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,” Pengelly summarized.

But Cricket, like almost any young dog, went “out of her mind with excitement , chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” Noem recounted.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Cricket killed chickens

Narrated Pengelly, “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.’

Noem paid the family for their chickens. Deciding that Cricket had proved herself ‘untrainable,’ ‘dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,’ and ‘less than worthless as a hunting dog,’” although killing birds is exactly what Noem had hoped to train Cricket to do, Noem shot Cricket in a nearby gravel pit.

Incidentally, of the 13,378 dogs who have killed or disfigured someone in the U.S. and Canada since 1982, in attacks logged and documented by ANIMALS 24-7, only three have been pointers of any sort, and one of those was a pit bull/pointer mix.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Shot goat because he smelled like a goat

“Incredibly,” Pengelly resumed, “Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished.

“Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat who was ‘nasty and mean,’ because he 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,” a problem that most goat-keepers solve by putting up a fence.

“Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog,” reported Pengelly. “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.’”

Noem responded to Pengelly, he added, by informing him that she also “just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”

Wayne Pacelle & greyhound.
(Beth Clifton collage)

“No rational & plausible excuse”

Responded Animal Wellness Action and Center for A Humane economy president Wayne Pacelle, “There is no rational and plausible excuse for Noem shooting a juvenile dog for normal puppy-like behavior.

“If she is unable to handle an animal, ask a family member or a neighbor to help.

“If training and socializing the dog doesn’t work, then give the dog to a more caring family or to a shelter for adoption.

“Raising and caring for a dog takes patience and kindness,” Pacelle said. “Tens of millions of Americans who know and love dogs have to wonder about a person who expresses hatred for a young female dog and kills her.”

Added longtime Humane Society of the U.S. representative Eric L. Sakach, “Noem has demonstrated that she shouldn’t be around any animal.”

Ed Boks & friend.

“I really wanted to like her”

Said Ed Boks, retired former director of the animal control agencies serving Los Angeles, New York City, and Maricopa and Yavapai counties in Arizona, “I really wanted to like her; but my God, this reads like a horror story. A puppy, a goat, and three horses not deserving to live, and there is only one common denominator: a woman not deserving of an animal.”

Police officers, to be sure, are very often obliged to shoot dogs, usually pit bulls, in the line of duty––almost always to rescue attack victims or to protect themselves.

Civilians also frequently shoot dogs, again also most often to protect themselves or others.

But those shootings occur under circumstances significantly different from shooting a 14-month-old dog trained to help kill birds, for killing birds.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Bounty program

Noem, meanwhile, already had a history of bloodlust unparalleled among current U.S. governors.

Among her first actions as the then newly elected governor of South Dakota, her campaign propelled by the endorsement of Donald Trump, was to introduce a “nest predator bounty program” in 2019 with the stated goals of “diminishing the population of animals who eat pheasant and duck eggs, get youth and families outside together, and helping to ensure trapping remains a part of South Dakota’s outdoor heritage.”

Funded with half a million dollars per year, the bounty program targets raccoons, coyotes, striped skunks, badgers, opossums, and red fox, from April 1 through July 1, with a goal of killing 50,000 “nest predators” per year.

To collect the bounty, participants must turn in the tails of the dead animals.

(Beth Clifton collage)

240,000 “nest predators” killed

Through 2023, 240,000 “nest predators” have been killed for the bounties.

The number of pheasants shot increased from 2019 to 2022 by 371,000.

Nonetheless, the 2022 toll of 1.2 million was still 900,000 below the number of pheasants shot in 2007, when no bounties were in effect, but weather conditions and farm cropping choices were more conducive to pheasant abundance.

(For a detailed analysis of the failure of the bounty program, which is to continue at least through 2026, see South Dakota predator bounty program to continue despite opposition, by Bart Pfankuch and Abbey Stegenga of South Dakota News Watch.)

Sitting Bull, killed on the Standing Rock reservation in 1890; White Bull, a Sioux victim of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre; marchers opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline.

Banished from Sioux reservations

Meanwhile, reported Justin Rohrlich for The Daily Beast on April 10, 2024, Kristi Noem “is now legally barred from visiting some 10% of the lands in her home state—and can be thrown out of those places if she violates the order.”

This came about after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council voted “to formally banish Noem from its reservation over recent public statements she made suggesting, among other things, that Native American tribal leaders are in league with Mexican drug cartels. Noem also recently accused Native American parents of not being involved enough in their children’s lives, blaming them for poor academic performance in tribal areas.

“The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,” Rohrlich noted, “is the third Lakota tribe in South Dakota to declare Noem persona non grata, following a banishment by the Oglala Sioux announced on March 18, 2024, and another by the Cheyenne River Sioux, announced on April 5, 2024.”

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe banished Noem on April 11, 2024, one day after Rohrlich’s article appeared.

Beth & Merritt Clifton

Explained Rohrlich, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairwoman Janet Alkire described banishment as a ‘rare but serious form of punishment’ granted explicitly by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and which tribal courts are mandated to uphold.

“Noem has the right to appeal her banishment in tribal court, according to Alkire,” Rohrlich said, but she is not expected to do so.