Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long held himself as a champion of nature and the outdoors, first through his decades of conservation work and now as part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA administration. At times, however, Kennedy’s fascination with the natural world has resulted in eye-opening episodes that blur for many observers the line between respectful curiosity and bizarre desecration of the very fauna he claims to revere. From ursine carcass pranks to whale-oriented road trips, these are Robert F. Kennedy’s most notable animal experiences.
Bear
The 2014 appearance of a bear carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park had remained a mystery for more than a decade until 2024, when Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, admitted in a campaign video with comedian Roseanne Barr that he was behind the bizarre episode. In the video, Kennedy claimed he’d watched a driver ahead of him hit and kill a small bear on the roadside and decided to put the carcass “in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat,” The Associated Press said. “But the day got away from him.”
Kennedy had preexisting travel plans and “did not want to leave the dead bear in his car,” Politico said. Instead, he “planted it in the park with an old bicycle” because it would “fit a narrative about a series of bike accidents in the city.” The incident ultimately “died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade,” Kennedy said in the clip, until The New Yorker “somehow found out about it” during the 2024 race.
Dog (?)
Allegations that RFK had eaten dog stemmed from a text to a friend featuring a photograph that “showed him pantomiming eating a cooked animal carcass,” said CNN. In the message, Kennedy allegedly “recommended the friend try eating dog while traveling in Korea,” although he has since denied eating one himself.
The picture is “me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat,” Kennedy said in a Fox News interview in 2024, “which is what we eat down there.” Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul,” the text’s initial recipient said to Vanity Fair. He was “certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat,” they added, calling the whole affair “grotesque.”
Mice
RFK Jr. is a “predator” about whom the previous generation of storied Kennedys “would be disgusted,” said former First Daughter and onetime U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in a scathing letter to Congress denouncing her cousin’s then-nomination process in early 2025. While largely focused on RFK’s potential impact on national health, Kennedy, in a shocking paragraph, said her cousin, in his younger years, “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”
The effect, Kennedy said, was often a “perverse scene of despair and violence.” The allegations describe a “power play to those forced to watch” and show signs of RFK being a “terrible bird handler,” said The Independent. “Who feeds a hawk puréed food?”
Raccoon
In her “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise” biography of the secretary, investigative journalist Isabel Vincent drew on “dozens of sources, both new and old, including journals updated daily by Kennedy between 1999 and 2001,” said People. In one such entry, Kennedy “boasts of cutting the penis from a dead raccoon he found on the side of a highway, while his kids waited in the car,” The New York Times said.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon,” Kennedy said, “thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.” Kennedy “wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid,” said Vincent to People. He has a “great love and interest in animals” and a “freezer full of roadkill, I’m sure, where he studies it.”
Whale
When RFK’s daughter Kick Kennedy was six years old, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port,” said Town & Country in a 2012 feature on Kennedy and her infamous family. The elder Kennedy drove to the site, “cut off the whale’s head” with a chainsaw and then “bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco,” the outlet said.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick said to T&C. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.” After the episode resurfaced during the 2024 election, Kennedy said at an Arizona rally that he was being investigated for “collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.” He also “implied without evidence” that the investigation was itself “tied to his endorsement” of Donald Trump, The Associated Press said. In October, 2024, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced in a statement to The Hill that it had closed an investigation into the decades-old claim, having “determined the allegation to be unfounded.”
Worm
In a 2012 deposition, RFK Jr. described a period several years earlier when, feeling fatigued and mentally hazy, he’d scheduled a procedure to treat what he’d been told was a brain tumor. But, while “packing for the trip,” he was contacted by a second doctor with a “different opinion,” The New York Times said.
Kennedy, the doctor believed, “had a dead parasite in his head.” The parasite had “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in the deposition, as reviewed by the Times. “The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago,” Kennedy’s then-presidential campaign said in a statement to CNN during the 2024 presidential race. The candidate is in “robust physical and mental health.” Kennedy himself made light of his cranial condition in a post on X in May 2024. “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms,” Kennedy said, “and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.”
From beached whales to road-kill raccoons and an infamous brain worm, the Health and Human Services Secretary has had his share of wild encounters.
