RIP cricket. Now it's time to talk about Kristi Noem's Goat.

In the universal outrage over South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's execution of her shaggy pointer, Cricket, another victim of her cruelty seems to have been forgotten: the male goat she dragged to the same gravel pit and shot dead.

Based on Noem's own description of the incident in her upcoming memoir, it seems likely that the animal died a terrifying death. His crime? It had a disgusting, musky, rancid odor and offended her children, causing them to fall and soil their clothes.

It's unclear why Noem, who likes to talk about being raised on a farm, was surprised by this behavior: Male goats that are in a state of excitement during the breeding season become more aggressive and urinate on themselves to generate an odor that only has a female of its kind. species could love.

Killing the goat didn't go as smoothly as shooting Cricket just before. Noem wrote that the first shot only caused the goat to jump, so she had to leave the wounded animal behind and return to her truck to get another grenade.

That suggests she used a shotgun and not a rifle, which required a bullet or cartridge, not a grenade. Anyone who knows about goats can tell you that their skulls have evolved for headbutting and are generally resistant to a shotgun blast.

I would never use one, Arkansas goat farmer Sarah Fish told The Daily Beast. I don't know how far it would penetrate.

Thanks to Fish's considerable experience, a small-caliber rifle in just the right spot does the job with one shot and without additional suffering.

We actually put ours down with just a .22, Fish said. The front of the skull is very strong, but if you look behind their horns it is actually very weak behind them. And so that's where we usually put them. You just have to find that place.

She raises goats for food and in ten years she has only had to shoot twice at a time.

And I swallowed a lot, because we eat a lot of it, she said.

It is unknown why Noem owned the goat. But Fish said there was no need for the death penalty for chasing human children.

I would recommend locking the goat out of the reach of children, she said.

She suggested that goats' behavior may have been a result of Noem not setting boundaries for them early on.

Many people don't realize that they think it's all fun when the goats are babies, and they play with them in ways they shouldn't, Fish said. And as they grow, they see you as competition. They don't respect you like they respect other goats.

Fish noted that mother goats keep weaned ones at bay.

They throw them in the air, Fish said. It's actually tough love. It teaches them boundaries. It teaches them how to behave.

She continued: As human beings, we are nurturing and caring, and oh, they rub their heads on my leg and oh, that's cute. But it actually teaches them bad manners.

If you then push away a young goat that is rubbing its head against your leg, its natural impulse is to immediately fall back and collide.

I tapped them in the nose and that made them turn their heads away, she said. It doesn't hurt them, but it is a bit annoying, so they stopped using it. And so we teach our goats boundaries from the start.

Noem apparently failed to set boundaries for her 14-month-old dog, which angered her by killing the neighbor's chicken and trying to bite her. Experts have said the dog could have been retrained or rehomed instead of being taken away by its owner.

Word of Noem's serial killing spree appears to have doomed any chance of her being chosen as Donald Trump's running mate, long seen as a burning ambition for her. In a desperate attempt to limit the damage, Noem tried to portray her massacre as a national reality.

We love animals, but on a farm these kinds of difficult decisions happen all the time, she said on social media.

An Arizona goat farmer who asked not to be named for fear of becoming embroiled in partisan politics said Noem's decision to use a weapon on the goat that required more than one shot was harsher on the animal than for her.

The goat is shot, but its brain is intact and it knows what's going on, the farmer said. And then she has to go rummage around and get a new grenade and then come back and do the same thing and eventually it expires.

The farmer suggested that Noem's story shows not only an insensitivity toward life and poor political insight, but also a limited understanding of the basics of farm life.

The audience is particularly fixated on the brutal death of Noem's dog, which was a pet after all. The demise of the goat has received relatively little attention.

Maybe people would care more if it had a name like Cricket. I propose Veep, in recognition of an opportunity that now seems as dead as a goat in a gravel pit.