He Shot His Neighbor's Chocolate Lab, In the Back.

Scott Herndon likes to talk about the Second Amendment the way some men talk about the fish that got away. On a right-wing livestream in January 2023, he mused that if the Senate Education Committee wouldn't hear his voucher bill, Idahoans might have to respond to "taxation without representation" the way the founders did: "hopefully, we're going to have the political fight before we have the real fight." Bold words from a man whose one documented "real fight" took place in 2012, when he shot his neighbor's dog. Not a charging dog. Not a dog with a chicken in its mouth. According to Bonner County Sheriff's reports cited by the Idaho Statesman, the dog was roughly 80 feet from Herndon's chickens, hadn't touched a single one, and had already turned to run when he yelled. So Herndon shot it. In the back. As it fled.

The neighbor, Richard Rawson, has since filled in the parts Herndon left out of his "protecting my food source" story: the dog was a 12-year-old, gray-faced lab who had just come through ACL surgery and could barely walk, and the thing drawing him onto Herndon's property wasn't the chickens but a pile of deer bones Herndon had left lying around. The .22 round lodged next to the dog's spine, and the vet couldn't remove it without risking paralysis, so Rawson had to put his old dog down. The sheriff's report lists the offense under investigation as animal cruelty, Idaho Code 25-3504. That's the full combat record of the senator from Sagle: one elderly, limping Labrador, shot from behind, over chickens it never reached. The next time Herndon warns the Legislature that patriots may have to "cast off the chains" of oppressive committee chairmen, remember who he actually pulled the trigger on. As Bryan Clark put it, Herndon says he works for his voters. Not if dogs could vote.