“Untrainable” is one of the most confident words a person can say about a dog, and it is almost never a fact about the dog. It is a description of where the human ran out of plan.
The word got a national airing in 2024, when then-South Dakota governor Kristi Noem described in her book No Going Back how she shot Cricket, her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, after the dog behaved badly on a pheasant hunt and later killed a neighbor’s chickens. She wrote that she hated the dog. She judged her “untrainable.” She called her “less than worthless,” and concluded she had to be put down. She shot a goat the same day. She has defended the account since, framing it as a hard thing a responsible person does.
Set aside the politics, because the politics are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that everything Cricket did was ordinary, and every one of those ordinary behaviors has a well-worn training answer that costs nothing but time.
What a 14-month-old bird dog actually is
Fourteen months sounds grown. It is not. A pointer at that age is roughly a high-school sophomore with an engine tuned for all-day endurance and a brain that has not finished wiring.
Joan Payton of the German Wirehaired Pointer Club of America made the point bluntly at the time: this was a puppy with no experience and no training, and you do not put a 14-month-old in the field beside finished adult dogs and expect a performance. Bird dogs are not physically mature until around two years old, and most are not fully trained until somewhere between three and five.
Dog trainer Zak George, who works in positive reinforcement, described the reported behavior on CNN as typical adolescent stuff from a dog bred to run all day without tiring.
So here is the honest list of what Cricket did:
- Lost her mind with excitement around birds. That is the trait she was bred for, expressing itself without an off switch installed.
- Failed to respond to cues in a screaming-loud environment. Cues do not transfer to high-arousal settings unless somebody deliberately trains them there.
- Killed chickens. A bird dog does not know that pheasants are the job and poultry is the neighbor’s property. Nobody told her, and nobody prevented her.
- Snapped when grabbed by an angry human in the middle of all of it. Dogs bite when hands come at them while they are over threshold. This is not a character flaw. It is a nervous system.
None of that is unusual. All of it is preventable.
The plan that was missing
If you hand me an adolescent bird dog who just wiped out a coop, I do not reach for a shock collar and I do not reach for a rifle. I reach for a sequence, and it looks like this.
Manage first, train second. Before a single training rep, the dog does not get unsupervised access to livestock. Long line, fenced run, closed gate. Management is not cheating. It is the thing that buys you the months you need to actually teach something. Every rehearsal of chicken-killing makes chicken-killing more likely; the fastest way to reduce a behavior is to make it impossible to practice.
Build a recall that survives arousal. A recall trained in the kitchen is a kitchen recall. You build the real one by paying enormously for it in boring places, then adding one increment of difficulty at a time: the yard, the yard with a squirrel, the field at fifty yards, the field with birds in the air. If the dog fails, you did not go slowly enough. You go back one step, not two steps forward with a correction.
Poultry-proof on purpose. Livestock tolerance is its own curriculum, and it is done at a distance the dog can think at, with the birds contained, over weeks. The dog learns that chickens predict food from you, not chase from them. If your dog cannot hold it together at forty feet, you do not test at four.
Set expectations for the age. We would not ask a puppy to hold a ten-minute stay with no training. Asking a green adolescent to contain herself in the exact situation her genes scream about is the same error wearing boots.
Throughout, the skilled version of this job is refusing to put the dog into any situation she cannot yet handle, while steadily widening the set of situations she can.
“When people tell me a dog is untrainable, I ask them what the last three weeks of the plan looked like, and almost always there wasn’t one,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “There was a hope, and then there was a punishment. That’s not a plan, and the dog is the one who pays for it.”
The tool that gets reached for instead
The reflex, when a young dog embarrasses us, is to escalate. Put a shock collar on him. Throw him into the situation and let him figure it out. Grab him by the collar and make it clear who is in charge.
The research on that reflex is not ambiguous, and it has stopped being a matter of taste.
Dogs trained with a high proportion of aversive methods show more stress behaviors during training, spend more time in tense low postures, pant more, and show larger post-training rises in cortisol than dogs trained with rewards. In cognitive bias testing, the same dogs come out measurably more pessimistic. And in a controlled trial run with trainers nominated by the electronic collar industry’s own association, the shock collar was no more effective than reward-based training at getting the job done.
That last finding is the one that ends the argument. The aversive tool is not a hard road to a better result. It is a hard road to the same result, with a more anxious dog at the end of it.
What behavioral euthanasia actually is
There is a real and painful category of dog for whom euthanasia is the least bad option, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But that category is narrow, and Cricket was nowhere near it.
Behavioral euthanasia is on the table when a dog presents a genuine, repeated danger that cannot be safely managed, after other avenues have been worked and failed. It is decided with a veterinarian and a qualified behavior professional, not in a gravel pit in a fit of temper. And it is carried out humanely, by a vet, which a gunshot from an angry owner is not.
The distance between “this dog is inconvenient and I am furious” and “this dog cannot be kept safely” is the whole ballgame. Collapsing it is not toughness. It is the absence of a skill.
What newer research adds
Since 2024, the evidence against correction-heavy training has only thickened. The welfare findings above come from controlled studies published in PLOS ONE and Animal Cognition, and the picture they paint is consistent: reward-based methods get equal or better behavioral results with measurably less fallout, and the fallout includes aggression directed back at the handler.
There is also a practical update for anyone with an adolescent who has started chasing things. Livestock and small-animal tolerance work is now standard curriculum at good sport and field programs, and most reward-based trainers will build you a poultry or livestock plan on request. If your dog killed a chicken last week, that is a training brief, not a verdict.
The story itself did not fade. Noem went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Cricket account resurfaced in her confirmation and oversight hearings, where at least one senator raised it as a question of judgment. Political columnist Meghan McCain had predicted as much in 2024, writing that a politician can come back from a lot of things “but not from killing a dog.”
She was right about the politics. She was also, accidentally, right about the dogs. People will forgive almost anything before they forgive giving up on an animal who was only ever fourteen months old.
References
- Vieira de Castro, A. C., et al. “Does training method matter? Evidence for the negative impact of aversive-based methods on companion dog welfare.” PLOS ONE, 2020. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225023
- Casey, R. A., et al. “Dogs are more pessimistic if their owners use two or more aversive training methods.” Animal Cognition, 2021. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8463679/
- China, L., Mills, D. S., & Cooper, J. J. “Efficacy of Dog Training With and Without Remote Electronic Collars vs. a Focus on Positive Reinforcement.” Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2020. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2020.00508/full
- American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior, “Position Statement on Humane Dog Training.” https://avsab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AVSAB-Humane-Dog-Training-Position-Statement-2021.pdf
