RFK Jr's fascination with dead animals includes whale head, raccoon penis

The US' Secretary of Health and Donald Trump aide, Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) has often positioned himself as a firebrand critic of long-established scientific consensus, which he describes as "corrupt". He doubts the veracity of vaccinations and push a discredited link between vaccines and autism. That being said, the figurehead of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement also seems to have nurtured a morbid enthusiasm for dead animals. He has sawn off organs of dead animals, ostensibly to study them.

In an anecdote in his biography, RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise that was published this week, RFK Jr claims to have cut off "the penis out of a road killed raccoon". Meanwhile, his daughter, Kick Kennedy, once told the news outlet, Town & Country that in the 1990s, her father lugged home the head of a whale carcass and affixed it to the roof of the family's minivan.

Talk about hands-on exploration.

This is, of course, not the only morbid tryst RFK Jr has had with dead animals.

For instance, according to a 2024 report in the US news outlet, The New Yorker, RFK Jr revealed to the independent presidential candidate describing to US actress Roseanne Barr, that in 2014, he had found the dead body of a bear cub killed by a car. According to the report, he had initially planned to "harvest" the bear's meat, before eventually dumping it in the middle of New York's Central Park, mystifying authorities as to how a wild animal's corpse ended up in the middle of one of the world's largest metropolises.

"He would pick it up from the road all the time and leave it in his minivan, and sometimes he’d forget", Carole Radziwill — who is the widow of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (JFK Jr's aunt)' nephew, Anthony, told Star magazine about RFK's roadkill obsession. "There'd be, like, a skunk under the seat. His minivan always smelled of death." RFK had also boasted in 2024 that he had a "freezer full" of animal organs.

These revelations of the Health Secretary's outlandish fascination with dead animals lying on the roadside led the US talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel to describe him as a "Roadkill Enthusiast."

HOW RFK TOOK AWAY A DECEASED RACOON'S GENITALIA

Going back to the case of the unfortunate raccoon, the incident comes from the man's biography, RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise, which was released Tuesday this week and is written by journalist Isabel Vincent.

Vincent told the New York Post she learnt about this incident from Kennedy's own private journals, which he wrote between the years of 1999 and 2001.

The journal, as posted by Vanity Fair, reads, "I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 (an interstate highway in New York State) cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be."

He added: "My kids waited patiently in the car."

Why might you ask? Vincent states it was so RFK Jr could "study it later". In any case, it is not known if the poor rodent could rest in peace after having its genitals taken away for "study".

WHEN THE US HEALTH SECRETARY STUCK A WHALE'S HEAD ON A MINIVAN

If that was not outlandish enough, the US' Health Secretary also once chainsawed the head of a washed-up whale during a family trip to a beach at Squaw Island, and strapped it to the roof of the family's minivan for the five-hour drive home to New York.

The incident was recounted by RFK's oldest daughter, Kick Kennedy, in a 2012 interview with Town & Country.

"Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet," she said in the 2012 interview. "We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us."

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