Bill Frist's cat-killing story

 After adding a post about Kristi Noem's dog-killing story, I realized I hadn't mentioned former House Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-TN) cat-killing story. Jeff Woods gave a quick overview of the story, which appeared in Frist's 1989 autobiography, Transplant, in his review of Frist's later book in The Nashville Scene in 2009:

Never say Frist doesn't learn from his mistakes. In his 1989 autobiography Transplant, he admitted that as a medical student he adopted cats from animal shelters, "treat[ed] them like pets for a few days," then took them to a lab to die in research experiments. He blamed this conduct on the pressures of med school.

"And I was totally schizoid about the entire matter," Frist wrote. "By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."

That bit of honesty cost Frist no little embarrassment in his 1994 Senate campaign, when he was mocked as a cat killer.

Kristi Noem's dog-killing story

 Before the release of South Dakota Governor (and prospective Trump VP running mate) Kristi Noem's book, No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, the Guardian published an account of her story in the book of becoming angered with her 14-month-old family dog Cricket when it (running loose off-leash) killed a farmer's chickens. She took the dog to a gravel pit and shot and killed it, and then, for good measure, decided to kill a goat as well. She wrote that the dog was "untrainable" and that she "hated that dog." She proudly described this impulsive act of killing a family pet without consulting with her family and in an inhumane manner as an illustration of her willingness to deal with things that are "difficult, messy, and ugly." But her first response to the Guardian story was to call it "fake news," then to defend herself by claiming that the dog was "a working dog and not a puppy. It was a dog that was extremely dangerous."

Subsequently, she did the opposite of her book title by retracting a story from the book that she had "stared down" Kim Jong Un when she met him, after a Noem spokesperson said she never met Kim Jong Un. Her book also claimed that she had cancelled a meeting with France's President Emmanuel Macron, whose staff said she never had a meeting scheduled with him.

As a result of this story, I've created a tag on this blog for "conservative animal abuse" since several previous examples were covered here going back to 2007.

James Dobson's dog-beating story

In James Dobson's 1978 book, The Strong-Willed Child, he writes about using a belt to beat his dachshund into submission:

Please don't misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.

The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn't realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.

At eleven o'clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.

On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater...

When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!"

I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud.

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!

Dobson's book is a promotion of corporal punishment in child rearing. This story is complementary to Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story, written at a time when Christian fundamentalists didn't seem overly concerned about abuse of animals--the 1970s.  It's also complementary to the story of Mike Huckabee's son killing a dog, and Mormon Mitt Romney's dog abuse story.

Thankfully, most of us today recognize that abusing animals is a sign of psychopathy.

UPDATED: To lengthen quote and correct source book title, as per Snopes.  The original 1978 hardcover version of the book is available for $0.01 on Amazon.com Marketplace.

Mike Huckabee's problems

Mike Huckabee's problems continue to accumulate. There's the little problem of his son David hanging a dog by its neck, slitting its throat, and stoning it to death--and the fact that Huckabee himself defends this animal cruelty (of the sort that's often a precursor to serial killing of human beings) on the grounds that the dog was emaciated and had mange. (You may recall that Mitt Romney has a similar, though not nearly as nasty, poor record with dogs.) David Huckabee killed the dog when he was 17 and was never prosecuted, but in April he faced a weapons charge for trying to take a loaded handgun through airport security in Little Rock.

Huckabee also claimed to Pat Robertson's CBN that "I'm the only guy on that stage with a theology degree," but he doesn't have a theology degree--he only attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a year, he's a theology-school dropout.

Then there's his role in calling for the 1999 release of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, who was strongly defended by Baptist minister Jay Cole, a close friend of the Huckabee family. Some conservative activists apparently defended Dumond on the grounds that one of his rape victims was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor. Several victims wrote letters to Huckabee describing Dumond's brutality, but Huckabee was quoted in a column by Steve Dunleavy titled "Clinton's Biggest Crime--Left Innocent Man in Jail for 14 Years" saying that "There is grave doubt to the circumstances of this reported crime." But as we know today, Dumond was guilty--he was released from prison in September 1999, apparently with some help from Huckabee, and he raped and murdered two women. Huckabee has refused to release his administration's records pertaining to Dumond on grounds that they contain sensitive law enforcement information.

In 1992, Huckabee called for AIDS victims to be quarantined, and refused to retract that position just recently, despite the fact that the disease is not spread through casual contact (which was also well known in 1992).

On top of all of this, Huckabee appears to be genuinely dumb. While governor of Arkansas, Canadian comedian Rick Mercer fooled Huckabee into congratulating Canadians on preserving their capitol building, the national igloo. He is a proud disbeliever in evolution and has publicly supported creationism, though now he refuses to answer questions about it. He thinks that women's role in marriage should be to "submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband". And in the December 11 Republican debate, Huckabee pledged to repeal the laws of thermodynamics, stating that "We ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is."

Intrade currently puts Huckabee's chances of obtaining the Republican presidential nomination at 16.8%, third behind Giuliani (36.0%) and Romney (22.0%) and ahead of McCain (8.8%) and Paul (8.5%). But it also puts him at the leading candidate for getting the Republican vice presidential nomination, at 28.9%, well ahead of Pawlenty (10.1%), Romney (8.6%), Thompson (7.6%), and Gingrich (6.5%).

UPDATE (December 25, 2007): Mike Huckabee's tied to Christian reconstructionists and thinks that the Ten Commandments are the basis of U.S. law (even though seven of the ten would be unconstitutional).

Mitt Romney's dog

David at Blue Mass Group offers comment on the Boston Globe's story which reveals that Mitt Romney used to strap his dog's carrier to the roof of the car and put the dog in it for 12-hour trips from Boston to Ontario (the specific story takes place in the mid-1980s). In the story, the children are disgusted because the dog, Seamus, has emptied his bowels in his crate, and the animal waste is dripping off the back of the car:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

David at Blue Mass Group, quoting Ana Marie Cox:

Massachusetts's animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal "in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon." An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying "it's definitely something I'd want to check out." The officer, Nadia Branca, declined to give a definitive opinion on whether Romney broke the law but did note that it's against state law to have a dog in an open bed of a pick-up truck, and "if the dog was being carried in a way that endangers it, that would be illegal." And while it appears that the statute of limitations has probably passed, Stacey Wolf, attorney and legislative director for the ASPCA, said "even if it turns out to not be against the law at the time, in the district, we'd hope that people would use common sense...Any manner of transporting a dog that places the animal in serious danger is something that we'd think is inappropriate...I can't speak to the accuracy of the case, but it raises concerns about the judgment used in this particular situation."

In the comments, several people correctly observe that a crate-trained dog won't relieve itself in its own crate unless it absolutely has to or is under extreme stress.

Not surprising from a man who wants to double the size of Guantanamo.

Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story

This story got some coverage a little over a year ago when Ian Frazier quoted this passage from Jerry Falwell's autobiography in a humor piece in The New Yorker and Jonathan Schwarz covered it in his blog. I found it so twisted that I had to validate its reality by purchasing a used copy of Falwell's book on Amazon.com Marketplace (for about $0.50). I think it's worth bringing up again now that Sen. John McCain has agreed to give a commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University ("crazy base world"), since it shows Falwell's lack of empathy--I think the attribute "bordered on" here is not cruelty but sociopathy.

From Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography by Jerry Falwell (1987, Simon and Schuster), pp. 49-50:

There were times that Dad's pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed "Crip" Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip's co-workers got tired of the old man's bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip's old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad's little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it "the toughest squirrel meat" he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.

This story immediately follows another story in which Falwell invites his young friend William from the neighborhood, who is afraid of his father, into the house for milk and cookies, after telling his father that William is afraid (p. 49):

William hesitated at the door. He knew my father carried a gun, and there were too many stories circulating about that gun to leave William feeling easy about entering our home. Quickly I pushed my friend inside and closed the door behind us. Dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. Suddenly he looked directly at us and shouted.
"Both of you, stop!" William froze in his tracks, and I leaned forward eagerly to see what Dad was up to. William's eyes opened wide as Dad drew his gun and pointed it at the floor just in front of my friend's trembling legs.
"Don't move," he said quietly. Then he took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The shot from the .38 Remington pistol blew a fairly impressive hole in the kitchen floor. Calmly, Dad blew smoke from the barrel and placed the pistol back on the table.
"I've been trying to get that fly all day," he said, looking back down at his paper. "And finally I got it."
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a gasp, William bolted out the door. I never got him back inside our house again, and the legend about my father continued to spread throughout the neighborhood. Later Dad and I laughed ourselves hoarse just remembering William's startled look and sudden exit.

For additional context, Falwell reports that his father killed his own brother with a shotgun (in self-defense, pp. 22-24), and attributes part of his father's problem to the fact that "After all, Dad grew up in the home of an atheist" (p. 17), even though he had a Christian mother. His book says that his father had a deathbed conversion to Christianity (p. 83).