'I hated that dog': Kristi Noem recalls gunning down family's 'worthless' pup

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a frontrunner to be named as Donald Trump's running mate, admitted to killing her family dog for misbehavior.

The Republican governor wrote in her forthcoming memoir, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, that the female dog Cricket had an "aggressive personality" and proved herself "untrainable," according to excerpts from the book published by The Guardian.

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that the 14-month-old wirehair pointer was “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

The governor said she included the story in her political memoir to demonstrate her willingness to take on “difficult, messy and ugly” tasks, and she described an attempt to teach Cricket to hunt with other dogs, but instead the pup ruined the trip by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life."

Noem unsuccessfully attempted to bring Cricket under control using an electronic collar, but she said the dog escaped her truck as she stopped to talk to a local family on the way home and attacked that family's chickens.

"[Cricket] grabbed one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another," she wrote, comparing the dog to “a trained assassin."

“[She] whipped around to bite me," Noem wrote, adding that Cricket was "the picture of pure joy" throughout the incident.

“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

Noem said she retrieved her gun and led Cricket to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

She then recounts how she killed one of her family's goats, a “nasty and mean" male that had not been castrated, by dragging him to the gravel pit, and afterward she realized a nearby construction crew had watched her slaughter both animals before her children were dropped off by a school bus.

“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem wrote, describing her daughter's reaction. “'Hey, where’s Cricket?'”

“I guess if I were a better politician," she added, "I wouldn’t tell the story here.”