Doctors enter politics over President Trump’s health care policies
Why some doctors say they felt a “moral imperative” to run for office
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared more famous encounters with wild animals in a new social media post.
In a post shared on Sunday, May 3, on social media channels including Instagram and X, Kennedy can be seen standing in front of an airport terminal, holding the bird in his fist and holding it up to the camera.
“Starling rescue at Dulles!” reads a simple caption, referring to Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport.
The bird, which appears intact, matches the description of the starling, a medium-sized perching bird of which more than 100 species exist. Some, but not all, of these species are considered invasive in the United States.
USA TODAY has reached out to President Kennedy’s office for comment.
“Please don’t eat it, Robert!”: Commenter responds to this post
As usual, commenters were quick to jump at the opportunity to crack a joke. In this case, it was about Kennedy’s legendary past with animals, especially one of wild persuasion.
“Don’t eat it, Robert!” The comment on Instagram has received 1,300 likes, with another jokingly adding: “I get really nervous thinking about birds.” Several commenters joked that the health secretary casually ate the bird, and one Reddit thread said the health secretary was holding the bird “like an ice cream cone.” Some people joked that it looked like he was carrying a weapon.
In response to the photo buzz, Kennedy further bragged to X about his interactions with wild animals. President Kennedy responded to a post gleeful about a politician’s “chance encounter with an animal” by posting an uncaptioned black-and-white photo of his younger self apparently jumping on the back of a rhinoceros with a cigarette in his mouth.
No further background was disclosed, but he is known to have “traveled extensively in Africa, South America, and Asia as part of his work as an environmental activist” in 2024, the campaign said.
Kennedy reportedly showed an interest in all kinds of animals from an early age, but as an adult he became somewhat known for how this interest manifested itself in strange and eyebrow-raising ways.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill all my life”: A brief history of Kennedy and animals
No wonder Kennedy’s previously published wildlife escapades, from freezers full of roadkill to home biology “experiments,” drew attention to this new post.
One of the most famous stories is of the Secretary of Health’s alleged encounter with a dead whale. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, President Kennedy’s eldest son, said in a 2012 interview with Town & Country that her father used a chainsaw to bring the giant animal’s head to life during a family vacation in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
Kick Kennedy, who was six years old during the trip, recalled his father rushing to the beach after word spread that a whale carcass had washed up on shore. She recalled that after decapitating the body, Kennedy tied its head to the roof of the family’s minivan with a bungee cord and made the less-than-comfortable five-hour drive to Mount Kisco, New York.
“Every time I accelerated on the highway, whale juice poured into my car window. It was the worst thing on earth,” Kick Kennedy told the magazine. “We were all wearing plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people were pointing fingers at us on the highway, and it was just a normal, everyday thing for us.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service told The Associated Press in 2024 that it was investigating the incident as a possible violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but the investigation was ultimately discontinued.
Kennedy’s apparent roadkill tendencies have crept into other headlines in recent years, most recently with the publication of the biography “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise” in April, and one such article raised some eyebrows. In the book, journalist Isabel Vincent details a 2001 entry in Kennedy’s personal diary in which he describes how he pulled over to cut out the genitals of a dead raccoon while his children waited in the car.
“I was standing in front of a parked car on Route 684, cutting the penis out of a dead raccoon in the road, thinking about how weird some of my family members had become,” the entry reads. Vincent told People magazine that Kennedy intended to “research” the body part.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill ever since I was born. I have a freezer full of it,” Kennedy told reporters while running for president in 2024, this time in response to a New Yorker story about the death of a bear cub.
The then-presidential candidate told comedian Roseanne Barr in an August 2024 conversation that he witnessed a car hit and kill a bear during a hiking trip in upstate New York in 2014. He left the body in his car with the intention of skinning it and “putting the meat in the fridge” and drove around all day, including visiting a steakhouse in Brooklyn, but then realized he had to catch a flight and dumped the body in Central Park.
“I thought it would be interesting for whoever found it,” Barr told Barr of his plan to stage the bear’s body to look like it had been hit by a bicycle in the park. The unexplained presence of a 6-month-old baby in New York’s largest urban green space has sparked a decade-long mystery.
An experienced falconer, Kennedy is also known for raising and training birds of prey. This hobby went a little too far in the eyes of at least one family member, cousin Caroline Kennedy, who wrote a letter to the senator during Kennedy’s health secretary confirmation hearings, calling him a “predator.”
She claimed that President Kennedy “enjoyed showing off how he would put baby chickens and mice into a blender to feed the hawks” and that “perverted scenes of desperation and violence” often occurred.
And, of course, there was a parasite that “got into my brain and ate parts of it and died,” Kennedy told the New York Times in 2025, but whether that qualifies as an animal rights issue doesn’t seem to be all that clear.
