Robert F. Kennedy Jr. freaked out his wife in a bizarre new snake-catching video that the health secretary posted online.
The footage shows Kennedy leaping up from his workstation after being interrupted with the announcement, “Bobby, there’s a rattlesnake in the driveway!”
“Hold on, guys. I’ll be back in a flash,” Kennedy says before emerging outside with a small fishing net and a large Rawlings bucket bearing Amazon branding.
The video appears to have been filmed at Kennedy’s home in California and was posted on his personal Instagram account in response to public reaction to another video of him wrestling snakes that appeared earlier this week.
Having ushered the snake into the bucket to off-camera applause, Kennedy picks it up carefully and examines it. “His fangs are in there. I don’t want to touch them,” he says as he opens the creature’s mouth for the camera.
“Can you ask Cheryl to get me a pillowcase?”
Kennedy’s wife, the Curb Your Enthusiasm actor Cheryl Hines, then appears in the video holding a pillowcase while keeping a very safe distance from her husband and his venomous friend.
“No. No. No. I’ll watch it from here,” Hines says, recoiling as the Cabinet secretary continues his appreciation of the western diamondback rattlesnake before releasing it into the wild.
Kennedy’s latest animal encounter revived memories of his long history of bizarre wildlife stories.
The longtime vaccine skeptic admitted last year he dumped the carcass of a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park after initially planning to skin and eat it.
Kennedy said he abandoned the animal after running out of time before a flight and staged the scene with a bicycle to make it look like the bear had been struck by a cyclist.
A biography also claimed Kennedy once cut the penis off a roadkill raccoon he found on a highway in 2001.
“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 wrote in a journal entry quoted in the book.
Other eyebrow-raising stories tied to Kennedy include allegations that he transported a whale head on top of his car after allegedly severing it with a chainsaw, collected bird skulls, and suffered memory problems after a worm reportedly ate part of his brain.
The Daily Beast reached out to the Health and Human Services Department for comment.
