Step aside Kristi Noem, there’s a new contender in the race to determine which conservative can murder a dog in the most brutal way imaginable.
According to a Tuesday report from The Guardian, Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation and a key architect of Project 2025, bragged to his colleagues about killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel.
Sources who spoke to The Guardian say that around 2004, when Roberts was employed as a professor at New Mexico State University, he described the incident to several colleagues at a dinner party.
“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” Kenneth Hammond, then chair of the university’s history department, recalled to The Guardian.
Marsha Weisiger, another contemporaneous colleague of Roberts, corroborated the story. According to Weisiger, Roberts had detailed the killing to her and her husband during a dinner party at his home, adding that he had also considered murdering puppies kept by his neighbors.
“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” Weisiger said.
The sources who described the incident noted that Roberts had never accused the dog of posing a physical threat to himself or members of his family.
Roberts, a Trump sycophant who has headed The Heritage Foundation since 2021, has described the mission of the conservative think tank as “institutionalizing Trumpism” — a mandate he hopes to achieve through the sprawling policy prescriptions detailed in Project 2025. The so-called “project” is a sprawling handbook laying out an extreme right-wing agenda for Trump to implement should he win in November. It covers virtually every corner of the government, including immigration, abortion, climate policy, and education. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 since Roberts said in July that America is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” — but the former president’s connections to the project are plentiful.
Roberts denied he told people about killing a dog with a shovel. “This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence,” he said in a statement provided to The Guardian. “In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”
The conservative operative also claimed that authorities in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he was living at the time, had eventually removed “more than 10” dogs from his neighbor’s property over allegations of animal abuse.
Roberts and his office identified the man responsible for the dogs as Daniel Aran, the son of the woman who still lives next door to the Roberts’ former residence, and would have been around 18 at the time of the alleged killing. Aran and his mother, Norma Noriega, denied ever having their dogs seized by animal control. The family kept three small pit bulls as pets, and sold their puppies as a source of extra income in the years the incident took place.
Aran confirmed to The Guardian that around 2004, his favorite dog, “Loca, my little female” had gone missing. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that,” Arana added. “But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catcher’s.”
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