Avowed dead animal enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken up the cause of preventing animal cruelty.
The health secretary, 71, joined his fellow Cabinet members to discuss the prevention of animal cruelty at an animal welfare roundtable and posed for photos with puppies on Wednesday.
Kennedy hoisted up a Labrador as he smiled next to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law.
“We are strengthening enforcement and advancing real, coordinated action across the federal government,” Rollins, 53, wrote in an X post, adding that the Agriculture Department would host a holiday adoption event.
“Protecting animals means showing up, and today we’re doing just that!” she said.
Officials might not need to look far for troubling instances of animal treatment.
Kennedy has a bizarre history with animals that came to the fore during his failed bid for the presidency last year.
In a resurfaced 2012 Town & Country magazine article, Kennedy’s daughter Kick recalled how her dad once ran down to a Massachusetts beach with a chainsaw after learning that a dead whale had washed ashore. He proceeded to cut off the animal’s head and bungee-corded it to the roof of their minivan for the five-hour trip back to New York.
“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. “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.”
It is illegal to collect parts of a protected animal’s carcass if soft tissues are still attached. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigated Kennedy over the incident but shut down the probe in October 2024 after finding that the allegation was “unfounded.”
In a 2024 video, Kennedy admits to coming across a bear carcass on the road and bringing it into Central Park as a prank.
“I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear into Central Park and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,” he said in a clip uploaded to X. “So we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
The next day, however, the carcass was all over the news.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’” he recalled. “Luckily, the story died down after a while and it stayed dead for a decade.”
Kennedy, a lifelong falconer, was also exposed by his own cousin Caroline for having a disturbing method for feeding his hawks.
“He enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks,” she said in a scathing letter to senators on the eve of his confirmation hearings. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Health Department for comment.
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