GOP Senator Rips Kristi Noem for Having 'Audacity' to Say Shooting Her Untrained Puppy Is ...

GOP Senator Rips Kristi Noem for Having 'Audacity' to Say Shooting Her Untrained Puppy Is a Lesson in 'Tough Decisions' Sen. Thom Tillis criticized the homeland security secretary's pattern of "bad decisions" to her face by referencing her 2024 memoir, in which she wrote about killing her "less than worthless" hunting puppy By Brooke Midgon Brooke Midgon Brooke Migdon is a writer-reporter at PEOPLE covering politics and royals. She previously reported on LGBTQ politics for The Hill. People Editorial Guidelines Published on March 3, 2026 05:58PM EST 14 Comments NEED TO KNOW Republican lawmaker Thom Tillis used a Senate hearing on Tuesday, March 3, to criticize Kristi Noem’s decision-making, referencing her controversial 2024 memoir in which she describes purposefully killing her untrained puppyTillis compared the homeland security secretary's farm decisions to her leadership of federal immigration operations, calling both examples of poor judgment“I’m giving you a performance evaluation here,” Tillis told Noem during the fiery hearing, adding, “Time after time after time, I’ve been disappointed" Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's resignation on Tuesday, March 3, during a tense Senate hearing wherein he compared Noem’s leadership of the department to the killing of her own dog. “Secretary, I read your book last week, and, honestly, some of the parts impressed me, but some of it distresses me,” Tillis said on Tuesday. “I’ll give you a good example of one that does — the passage where you talk about killing a dog that was 14 months old.” Noem’s 2024 memoir, No Going Back, sparked controversy after The Guardian, which obtained an excerpt of the book roughly a month before its publication, reported that Noem described within the book’s pages her shooting and killing of a wirehaired pointer named Cricket, whom Noem wrote was “untrainable” and “less than worthless” as a hunting dog. “I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, noting that she had attempted to train Cricket with an electric collar but ultimately made the decision to put her down by shooting her in a gravel pit after the puppy attacked a neighbor’s chickens. Noem also wrote of killing a male goat on her family’s farm in the same manner. The goat, she wrote in her memoir, was “nasty and mean” because it had not been castrated. Noem, then the South Dakota governor, responded to backlash toward her memoir at the time on X, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm." She added that even more recently, she had to put down three of her family's horses. Related Stories Kristi Noem Doubles Down on Killing Her ‘Less than Worthless’ Hunting Puppy: ‘I Decided What I Did’ DHS Is Trying to Buy a $70 Million Luxury Jet, Says It’s for Deportations and Kristi Noem’s Travel Tillis questioned Noem’s actions during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, likening her decision-making on the farm to her management of deadly immigration operations in Minneapolis. Two U.S. citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 — were shot and killed by federal agents in January during "Operation Metro Surge" in Minnesota. “You should know that if you're going out to a hunting lodge and you're putting pheasants out and you're putting dogs out, you don't take a puppy out there — a 14-month-old dog is basically a teenager in dog years,” Tillis said. “You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time and training, and then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it's a leadership lesson about tough choices.” “You are a farmer. You don't castrate a goat; they behave badly. You should have probably done that before,” Tillis said. “But my point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis.” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis shouted at DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on March 3, 2026. Mandel NGAN/AFP via Getty; Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty The North Carolina Republican, who will retire when his term ends in January, also accused Noem of needlessly delaying federal emergency funding and threatened to block President Donald Trump’s nominees in the Senate until Noem responds to questions he has posed about immigration operations in his state. “I’m giving you a performance evaluation here,” Tillis told Noem during Tuesday’s hearing, adding, “Time after time after time, I’ve been disappointed.” “What we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership,” he concluded. Leave a Comment Read more: Politics