A new book has pulled back the curtain on a truly bizarre chapter in the life of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., detailing an incident where he stopped his car on a highway to remove the genitals from a deceased raccoon. The book, titled RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, was released this week and uses entries from Kennedy’s own private journals to shed light on his long-standing and well-documented fascination with animal remains.
The specific raccoon incident took place on November 11, 2001, on I-684 in New York, as per The Guardian. According to the book, Kennedy pulled his vehicle over, leaving his children to wait inside while he attended to the animal on the side of the road. In a journal entry from that day, Kennedy wrote, “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.” Isabel Vincent, the author of the book, told People that Kennedy’s intention behind this gruesome harvest was that he wanted to “study them later.”
The book highlights that Kennedy has consistently sought out dead wildlife for collection or study. During a trip to Long Island in 2001, a journalist traveling with him observed that he was deeply interested in dead seagull corpses. Kennedy reportedly remarked, “I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” although his schedule that day prevented him from stopping to retrieve the bones.
RFK Jr’s history with animal carcasses is extensive and often involves unconventional methods
Perhaps the most infamous instance involves a whale carcass that washed up on the beach at Squaw Island in Hyannis Port during the 1990s. His daughter, Kick Kennedy, shared in a 2012 interview that her father used a chainsaw to sever the head of the whale so he could strap it to the roof of the family car.
She described the aftermath as particularly intense, noting, “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 added that they wore plastic bags over their heads with holes cut out while fellow drivers reacted with shock, yet she characterized the experience as “just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
The trend of leaving animal remains in public spaces continued well into his later life. In 2014, Kennedy admitted to abandoning a dead bear cub in Central Park. He told Roseanne Barr that he had encountered the bear after a woman hit it with her car while he was driving upstate.
Kennedy claimed he put the bear in his van, went falconing, and eventually stopped at the Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn. Realizing he wouldn’t have enough time to bring the bear home before a flight, he decided to leave the carcass in the park, hoping to make it appear as though a bicyclist had struck the animal.
Beyond his interactions with dead animals, Kennedy has maintained a personal life filled with exotic and often aggressive creatures. He previously lived with an aggressive emu named Toby that frequently charged at his wife, Cheryl Hines. Hines told The New York Times in 2024 that she would wake up daily wondering if that was the day she would have to kill the bird in their backyard. The emu eventually met its end when it was killed by a mountain lion.
Kennedy’s childhood also featured a menagerie of pets, including a coati, a relative of the raccoon, that once attacked his mother and sent her into premature labor. As a child, he even reportedly brought a sack of pet reptiles on a flight from Washington National to LaGuardia, where they escaped and caused chaos among the passengers as he scrambled to retrieve them.
These stories paint a picture of a man whose relationship with the animal kingdom is, to put it mildly, unconventional. Whether it is the well-known report of a parasitic worm that once occupied a portion of his brain or the rumors of him eating dog meat in Korea, which he denied, claiming the animal in a photo was a goat, Kennedy’s life has been marked by a series of strange, animal-related headlines, his cocaine snorting story on a toilet seat notwithstanding.
Published: Apr 17, 2026 04:00 pm