Robert F Kennedy Jr: Wild footage emerges of US Secretary of Health wrangling black snakes with bare hands
Robert F Kennedy Jr smiled as he was bitten while grabbing two angry snakes.
A wild video of Robert F Kennedy Jr wrangling two snakes with his bare hands has gone viral online.
The crazy clip shows the US Health Secretary shoeless and dressed in trousers, a dress shirt and tie as he corners two black snakes that are catching some sunrays on a patio in Florida.
Mr Kennedy then crouches down as he struggles to grab the reptiles as they attempt to slither away.
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His wife, Cheryl Hines, can be heard from behind the camera urging Mr Kennedy to be careful as the serpents aggressively wriggle in his grip and bite Mr Kennedy’s hand.
Mr Kennedy wrote in the caption accompanying the video he posted on X that he was removing the snakes from his colleague, Dr Mehmet Oz’s home in Florida.
“Cheryl cheerleads the removal of a pair of Black Racers from Dr Oz’s patio,” the caption accompanying the video on Mr Kennedy’s X reads.
Dr Oz is a controversial celebrity medic who is now serving as administrator for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the US.
Another voice in the background can be heard saying “well they were having sex” as Mr Kennedy identifies the snakes as Northern Black Racers.
The species, which are native to the US, are not venomous and are generally harmless to humans as long as they are left alone, according to National Park Service.
Mr Kennedy’s serpent encounter adds to a long catalogue of strange animal run-ins.
In 2024, the health secretary admitted to planning to skin and eat a bear cub that was struck by a car.
After running out of time, Mr Kennedy instead decided to stage a prank by dumping the bear’s carcass next to a bicycle in New York’s Central Park.
The 2026 biography RFK Jr: The fall and Rise revealed Mr Kennedy’s journal entries from the early 2000s in which he admitted to stopping on a highway to cut out the genitals of a dead racoon for quasi-scientific study.
