“Bobby, why?”
Kennedy posted a video that begins with this phrase on X on May 26. The footage shows him catching two snakes with his bare hands in the yard of his colleague, Dr. Mehmed Oz, the host of a popular health show (aired from 2009 to 2022 in the US) who now heads the US Medical Centers. The video shows the minister, dressed in clothes not suited for snake hunting and without shoes, walking up to snakes in the corner of Oz's Florida patio in just his socks, grabbing them and then pointing them to the camera. The reptiles, meanwhile, wriggle in his hands and bite.
The people who are off camera ask what kind of snake this is and tell them to let them go. “Are you crazy?” – Kennedy Jr.’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines, asks rhetorically.
These snakes were probably mating when the minister decided to catch them, writes The New York Times, emphasizing that experts advise against repeating his actions. The reptiles in the video are black snake or in English – Black Racer (the name literally translates as “black racer”; they are very fast), Kennedy Jr. pointed out. According to the US National Park Service, they are non-venomous and will not harm humans if left alone.
Kennedy Jr. obviously understood that he was catching non-venomous snakes, and coped with the task with a 9.6 out of 10, said reptile catcher Bruce Ireland in a commentary to the NYT. “He caught both of them and did it in such a way that the snakes did not appear to be harmed,” the expert said. But at the same time, he emphasized: most people who were bitten by snakes were trying to move them or harm the reptiles. “So my advice to everyone is: leave them alone,” Ireland said.
People need to stay away from snakes because they become more active in the spring, the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission recently warned. The agency emphasized that they should not be moved or handled, even if they are non-venomous snakes – they can also bite painfully.
The snake bite, unlike the moccasin snake bite the minister's wife mentioned in the video, is similar to a needle prick, he says. The bites probably hurt Kennedy Jr.'s pride more than they caused any pain, Ireland added.
He cut off the penis of a raccoon, beheaded a whale, carried the body of a dead bear cub in his car all day – and then threw it away. You've never seen a bigger cringe
The BBC and NYT remind: the snake incident is just one of a number of other “interactions” between the US Secretary of Health and the animal world. Kennedy Jr., as the American media write, is an “avid lover of outdoor activities” and a falconer who himself has told strange stories about encounters with animals.
One of them is a re-enactment of an accident with a bear. Kennedy said in August 2024 that more than 10 years ago, while hunting, he witnessed an animal being hit and killed by a car. Kennedy Jr., in his own words, loaded the carcass of the downed bear into his car – he planned to pick up the meat and put it in the refrigerator. But the official did not have time to go home after the hunt before dinner in New York and decided to get rid of the carcass – and stage the death of the bear as an accident with a cyclist in Central Park. He thought that this would not arouse suspicion – and the event became national news; the NYT even wrote about the details of the bear’s death.
AP emphasizes: Kennedy Jr. carried the carcass of a killed animal in his car all day (it was a bear cub, the agency clarified), and then threw it away after learning that he would need to fly on an airplane.
“I was worried because my fingerprints were all over that bike… Fortunately, after a while this story was forgotten,” Kennedy Jr. commented. According to the politician, he has been collecting downed animals on the road “all his life” and has “a whole freezer full of them.”
Another wild story in every sense of the word was told by the daughter of the minister, Kick Kennedy, in an interview with Town & Country in 2012. According to Kik, when she was six years old, news spread that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Guyannis Port, Massachusetts. Her father, “who loved to study animal skulls and skeletons,” ran to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale's head and then tied it with a bungee cord to the roof of the family minivan for a five-hour drive to Mount Kisco, New York, the media reported.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice (we are talking about the liquid released from a dead carcass. – “GORDON”) flooded the car windows, and it was the most disgusting thing imaginable. We all put plastic bags over our heads with holes cut out for our mouths, and people on the highway gave us the middle fingers, but for us it was just normal,” she said.
The AP wrote in 2024 that the Federal Environmental Protection Agency had opened an investigation into the case, and Kennedy himself said that the deadline for filing charges had long expired. He neither confirmed nor denied the fact. The investigation was closed later that year, with agency agents concluding that the accusations of sawing off the whale's head were unfounded, CNN reported.
Kennedy Jr. was also accused of animal cruelty by his cousin Caroline. Before the Senate hearing on his candidacy for the post of minister, she addressed lawmakers with a letter in which she called the official a “predator.” A video of her reading this letter was released by her son Jack Schlossberg on January 28, 2025.
Caroline said her brother liked to brag about how he “shredded chickens and mice in a blender to feed his hawks.”
“These were often horrific scenes of despair and violence,” she explained.
Journalist Isabel Vincent published a book about the minister in April 2026. It is, as People magazine reports, based on insider stories and entries in Kennedy Jr.’s personal diaries, which were kept by his first wife Mary (who committed suicide in 2012). And there is an episode with animals too. According to the author, the official described in his diary how on November 11, 2001, he stopped on the side of the road to cut off the penis of a dead raccoon. The tabloid calls this story “another strange case in the long history of Kennedy's predilection for animals killed on the road.”
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“I stood outside my parked car on I-684, cutting out the penis of a roadkill raccoon, and thought about how weird some of my family members were,” the magazine quoted him as saying. “My children waited patiently in the car.”
Why is he doing this?
The American media does not give a clear answer to this question. He beheaded the whale, allegedly out of love for science; the raccoon’s penis was supposed to be “examined.” In a review of the book, Vincent writes to People that the biography chronicles the struggles, shortcomings, tragedies and chaos that plagued the official throughout his life, from the murders of his uncle and father to his astonishing career rise during Trump's second presidency. The diaries reveal that he came up with a “self-hatred” system for assessing adultery and carefully tracked his infidelities. When he put 10, it meant sexual intercourse; a lower number meant a different degree of infidelity to his wife.
In his diaries, he, a zealous Catholic, allegedly wrote that when he cheated, he was “robbed” by seductresses, and if he managed not to cheat on his wife, he wrote down a “victory” for himself.
The Senate confirmed him to the post of Minister of Health in February 2025, when most of the facts described above had already been made public.
