Kennedy snaps back at comment about ‘whale heads, bear heads, and raccoon parts’

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. snapped at Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) on Tuesday after the lawmaker said he wished Kennedy would spend “less time talking about whale heads, bear heads and raccoon parts.”

The exchange came as Carter’s time for questioning wound down during a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on the Department of Health and Human Services’ fiscal year 2027 budget.  

“I got two seconds. Respectfully, you know what? I really wish you’d spend more time on, more time thinking about the American people, less time talking about whale heads, bear heads and raccoon parts,” Carter said.

“I don’t talk about any of those things,” Kennedy shouted back, before Health subcommittee Vice Chair Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) interjected to move on to the next lawmaker.

Kennedy has been involved in several encounters involving dead animals throughout his life, admitting ahead of the 2024 presidential election that he dumped a dead bear in Central Park in 2014.

The secretary, who was pursuing an independent bid for president before he dropped out and endorsed President Trump, claimed at the time that he wanted to clarify what happened before The New Yorker released a “bad story” about him.

The New Yorker profile included a photo of Kennedy sitting in the truck of a car with his hand in a dead cub’s bloody mouth.

About a month later, Kennedy confirmed that he was under investigation for “collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago” after a 2012 interview with his daughter, Kick, resurfaced.

“Right after I endorsed President Trump, I received a letter from the ‘National Marine Fisheries Institute’ saying that they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago,” Kennedy said at an Arizona campaign event for Trump, framing the probe as politically motivated.

Kick Kennedy told Town & Country Magazine that her father cut the head off a whale that had washed up on the shore in Hyannis Port, Mass., when she was a child.

An environmental advocacy group demanded an investigation into whether Kennedy had violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act or Endangered Species Act, which they said makes it “illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded its probe a couple of weeks later, labeling the allegations “unfounded,” and closed the case.

Kennedy’s strange animal encounters reentered the spotlight this month, after a New York Post reporter included an anecdote about the secretary reportedly cutting off the genitalia of a road-killed raccoon roughly 25 years ago.

The book, titled “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise,” cited a journal entry made by Kennedy detailing the moment on a New York highway in November 2001, according to The Guardian.

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy reportedly wrote in the journal. “My kids waited patiently in the car.”

The book’s author told People last week that Kennedy took the raccoon’s genitals to “study them later.”

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