RFK Jr.'s Wife Cheryl Hines Left Rattled After the Health Sec. Grabs a Pair of Wild Snakes With His Bare Hands in Shocking Video
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. charmed some wild snakes he found in Florida.
May 26 2026, Published 5:40 p.m. ET
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. left his wife, Cheryl Hines, horrified when he scooped up a pair of rowdy reptiles with his bare hands, RadarOnline.com can report.
The famed animal enthusiast usually sticks to roadkill and other dead creatures, but this time, he went after live game and ended up paying the price.
Kennedy Snake Center
The HHS Secretary cornered the snakes while visiting Dr. Oz.
Kennedy posted a video to his social media showing what happened when he came across a pair of black racer snakes while visiting Dr. Mehmet Oz in Palm Beach, Florida.
The 72-year-old looked absolutely giddy as he cornered the non-venomous snakes against a wall before bending over and snatching them up.
The captured critters slithered wildly, trying to break free, but to no avail. The snakes may have been extra peeved if Dr. Oz's assessment that they were "having s--" was true.
Kennedy smiled as he held up his latest animal trophies, while Hines tried to curb her enthusiasm at his conquest.
"Ok, ok, honey, let them go," a panicked Hines yelled. "Bobby, please! Bobby, Bobby, please!" she continued in horror as the secretary showed off his new prizes.
Critics Slither Around Kennedy
The snakes fought back, biting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As Kennedy tried to adjust his grip on the snakes, one of them bit him, which he simply laughed off. However, critics online were more than a little rattled.
"I like you, Bobby, but surely you have more sense than this," one person remarked on X. "Posting another odd animal encounter while you’re hanging out on former Oprah operative [Mehmet] Oz’s oceanfront villa, while gas is over $5 and grocery bills are up 30 percent."
Another person snarked, "He wants to be cool like [Steve] Irwin was but he’s not."
One person pointed out, "Throw them over the wall, in the ocean, anything. But stop holding them while they keep biting."
Another user bashed, "A snake oil salesman removing snakes. Oh, the irony."
Roadkill Raccoon Removal
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s wife, Cheryl Hines, could be heard on the tape begging him to put the snakes down.
As Radar previously reported, the HHS Secretary also has a strange history of snatching up roadkill and shoving the creatures in a freezer to "study" or "feed to his birds of prey."
Kennedy's obsession with dead street animals is documented in the unauthorized biography on the 72-year-old, titled RFK JR.: The Fall and Rise.
The politician would reportedly write about his roadkill collection in his diaries. In one entry from November 2001, Kennedy reportedly spoke about finding a dead raccoon on a highway between Connecticut and New York.
"I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the p---s out of a road killed raccoon, thinking how weird some of my family members have turned out to be," he wrote.
He later added that his kids "waited patiently in the car" as he did so.
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The Bear Necessities
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been criticized for his bizarre animal interactions.
Kennedy famously went viral when he admitted that he once put a dead bear cub in his car while on a hiking trip, drove around with it for a day, then dumped it in Central Park as a "prank".
During his brief run for president in 2024, Kennedy sat down with comedian Roseanne Barr and shared that years earlier, he was driving in upstate New York early one morning when a driver in front of him hit and killed a baby bear.
"So, I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was gonna skin the bear," he explained flatly. "It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator."
He headed back to the city with the dead bear in tow. But because he was running late, he and some friends decided to dump the 44-pound cub in Central Park and stage it to look as if it had been hit by a bike.
"We went and did that," he confessed to Barr. "And we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something."
