Vice President JD Vance might have put his foot in his mouth this week after an offhand comment comparing animal abusers to serial killers appeared to include one of his own colleagues.
During an interview on the New York Post podcast Pod Force One with Miranda Devine, Vance was chatting about his German shepherd, Atlas. Devine praised the dog’s calm behavior and couldn’t resist taking a jab at President Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, who made headlines for biting Secret Service agents.
The conversation then took a turn when Devine brought up Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. A recent viral clip showed Piker allegedly using a shock collar on his dog during a livestream, though he denied it, saying it was “a vibration collar for reinforcing her training.”
“Wasn’t that disgusting?” Devine asked Vance. “What does hurting a dog say about a person?”
“I think it tells you that they’re bad people,” Vance replied. “If you can actually cause suffering to an innocent animal, you’re probably the kind of person who doesn’t worry about suffering in people as well.”
He went further, adding, “If you mistreat dogs, that’s almost a 100% sign that you’re gonna be a really terrible person. You know, it’s like the Jeffrey Dahmer thing. Like every serial killer ever has actually been really bad to animals, that’s sort of how they started. I remember the Freddy Krueger movies when I was a kid… Well, how did Freddy Krueger get his start? One of the things they show is young Freddy Krueger torturing animals.”
Vance concluded his point with a bit of moral flair: “If you’re not taking care of God’s creatures then you are certainly going to be, I think, a pretty bad person in other ways too.”
It was a pretty clear stance — until you remember that one of the people in his own administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, literally admitted to killing her puppy in her 2023 memoir.
When Noem was still South Dakota’s governor, she shared in her book that she shot her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, calling the dog “less than worthless” as a hunting companion. She wrote that Cricket killed a family’s chickens and ignored training commands, even with an electric collar. Fed up, she took the dog to a gravel pit and shot it.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote. “But it had to be done.”
By Vance’s own logic, that would make Noem — his fellow Republican and cabinet member — the kind of person he just said only “terrible people” could be.
Online, listeners were quick to catch the irony. Vance had managed to compare animal abusers to Jeffrey Dahmer and Freddy Krueger while apparently forgetting that one of the most powerful people in his own circle openly bragged about killing a dog.
When Devine later asked about how Atlas behaves around former President Donald Trump, Vance said he keeps the dog upstairs — “presumably because dogs can smell evil,” the interviewer quipped.
But in this case, the real smell of trouble came from Vance’s own words, which unintentionally painted a dark picture of his colleague’s past actions.