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.