'I didn't shoot my dog': Romney blasts comparisons with Kristi Noem

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) rejected a comparison between him and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) over politically damaging stories involving their dogs.

When Romney ran for president in 2012, a decades-old story came out about him tying his dog's kennel to the roof of his car on a family road trip with the dog inside. More recently, Noem has faced criticism for a story about how she shot her puppy 20 years ago.

However, Romney insisted their was no equivalence between his dog story and Noem's.

“I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog,” Romney said in an interview Tuesday with the Huffington Post. “I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

In 2012, Romney defended his decision to have his dog travel on the outside of the car in 1983 during a 12-hour road trip to Canada, despite the Irish setter having diarrhea.

“This is a completely airtight kennel and mounted on the top of our car,” Romney told Fox News at the time. “He climbed up there regularly, enjoyed himself. He was in a kennel at home, a great deal of time as well. We loved the dog. It was where he was comfortable, and we had five kids inside the car. My guess is he liked it a lot better in his kennel than he would have liked it inside.”

According to Noem's upcoming memoir, she shot and killed her 14-month-old dog for allegedly being "untrainable."

"It was not a pleasant job," she wrote, "but it had to be done."

Noem, considered to be a potential vice presidential pick for former President Donald Trump, has faced backlash over the story.

Multiple Democratic governors, including Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey posted pictures of themselves with their dogs and the caption: "Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit."

Noem defended her decision on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, writing, "[t]he fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did."