Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., tore into the homeland security secretary at a hearing, saying he will hold up Trump’s nominees until he gets answers from her department.
During a tense public hearing Tuesday, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign over her handling of the deadly Minneapolis immigration operation.
And he blasted her for killing her dog, which she had described in her memoir as “untrainable,” as well as a goat. Tillis, of North Carolina, argued that killing the animals reflected bad judgment and compared it to DHS’ fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.
Then he senator threatened to block many of Donald Trump’s nominees until he gets answers to questions he has posed to the administration about Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Charlotte.
I get that you’re mocking her, but genuinely sometimes, when you’re particularly rural, you do in fact have to shoot a dog.
Where I grew up, there was no animal control. There was no one to call if there were loose animals. Combine that with the fact that it was an area where people would just dump unwanted animals, and we had a real feral dog problem.
When you have dangerous dogs show up a couple of times a month, and your only other option to get rid of them is to try and catch them, load them up in a crate, drive them an hour into town, just to give them to a pound that’s gonna put them down anyway; yeah, sometimes you kinda don’t have much other option but to shoot them.
My dad put down a good few dogs when I was young. It wasn’t something he liked doing. But when you have young kids running around, you can’t just let a bunch of feral dogs run loose.
What should he have done? What was the “correct” decision for him to make?
this wasn’t a feral dog. It was a young dog that she had not trained for hunting, which she took on a hunt and it got anxious so she shot it.
Did you not see the part where I said I wasn’t defending Noam and that what she did wasn’t what I’m describing?
Two things can be true. Noam can be a bad person, and people in rural areas can, unfortunately, sometimes have to put down feral dogs.
Now I’m just curious where you lived that there was no shelter to take unwanted dogs to. That’s what we did and I’m originally from BFE.
I grew up on 150 acres in a very rural part of the Southern US.
This could also be an age thing though. There is now a county animal control and some animal shelters. That wasn’t true in the early 90s.
But the area has grown a bunch since then too. What used to be farmland for ages has started to turn into suburbs and subdivisions. I’m sure what I’ve described is still pretty normative in places that are still underdeveloped.
Here in my area of rural east Texas the only safe shelters for dogs, that I know about, are already at capacity and cannot take new ones.
I’m all for finding homes for stray dogs or even having people feed community strays.
But life is complicated and there are no nice options to deal with some dogs who pack up and become a menace.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in East Texas as well, probably an hour and a half into Texas from Shreveport. I can say this has been true since at least the 80s that I’m aware of. It’s not “lol, can’t train 'em gotta put 'em down!” and more “I guess I could call the sheriff and he’ll come out and maybe accidentally shoot my dog along with this pack of aggressive, possibly diseased animals who may be gone in the half hour it’ll take him to get here or I can make sure my dog and kid are safe.” I guess there was also “I’ll go ahead and risk my life and start the treatment for rabies and try to catch this pack of feral animals and take them to Dallas where I’m sure the second I turn my back they’re going to be put down because they’ve been out here killing and that’s all they know.”
We had wandering strays that never caused a problem. We did have a problem with meth heads dumping failed fighting dogs. The only time it got to be a real gray area was when you weren’t sure whether a dog had a disease that caused balance issues or if one had just tangled with a wild animal and was hurt. But a hurt dog is also a dangerous dog and you’re still running up against waiting half an hour for a sheriff that might show up blasting every animal in sight whether it’s gone or not and possibly having your family hurt.
Life is complicated. And it sucks. And some of us are just out here doing the best we know how. Except Kristi Noem apparently who hated that dog and didn’t care for it or train it properly, blamed the dog for her failure, then decided she also hated a goat, missed the kill shot, and had planned so poorly that she had to go reload and come back for round 2. That’s fucking incompetence and spite, not protecting her kids and her neighbor’s chickens. Luckily she surely won’t bring that kind of incompetence and hatefulness to any job she might do with the government. Surely not, no way.