On Memorial Day weekend 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video of himself grabbing two live black racer snakes bare-handed at Dr. Mehmet Oz‘s beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida — and getting bitten in the process. His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, can be heard repeatedly shouting “Bobby, please!” and “You’re nuts!” as RFK Jr. laughs and keeps holding both snakes. The clip went viral almost immediately, but for anyone paying attention, it wasn’t exactly out of character.
What Actually Happened at Dr. Oz’s House
The snakes were black racers, a common nonvenomous species in southeastern Florida — fast, defensive, and not particularly happy about being picked up mid-mating. RFK Jr. grabbed both of them with his bare hands while still in dress clothes and socks, no shoes. One bit his finger. He laughed. The video, which he posted himself on X, shows a man who is either genuinely fearless around wildlife or deeply indifferent to the concept of consent — the snakes’, at minimum.
Cheryl Hines’s reaction became its own subplot. Her pleas landed somewhere between exasperated and genuinely alarmed, which is fair: watching your husband get bitten by a snake he interrupted from mating is not a normal Sunday. The contrast between her visible distress and his total calm is exactly what made the clip so shareable — it reads like a nature documentary where the host has gone rogue and the producer is losing her mind off-camera.
This Is Not the First Animal Story Involving RFK Jr.
Here’s where it gets harder to dismiss as a quirk. In 2014, Kennedy admitted to placing a dead bear cub in Central Park to make its death look accidental — a story that resurfaced with fresh horror once people started cataloging his wildlife moments. His daughter separately described him chainsawing a dead whale’s head in Massachusetts and transporting it on his car roof, which is the kind of detail that stops a conversation cold. In 2024, he posted footage of himself catching and relocating a rattlesnake near his California home, framing it as a public service. Earlier in 2026, he shared a photo rescuing a starling at Dulles Airport. The Palm Beach snakes are the latest entry in a pattern that is, depending on your perspective, either a deep and genuine connection to the natural world or the kind of thing that defines a public figure’s legacy more than any policy position ever could.
What’s consistent across all of it is that Kennedy doesn’t perform discomfort. The bear incident aside — which is its own distinct thing — the snake catches, the whale story, the starling: they all point to someone who genuinely doesn’t flinch around animals. Whether that reads as “badass” or “reckless” probably depends on how you already feel about him. Social media split roughly along those lines, with one camp calling him fearless and another pointing out that disturbing mating wildlife for a viral video is, at minimum, bad etiquette toward the snakes.
The Part That’s Easy to Overlook
The snakes were fine. Black racers are nonvenomous, and RFK Jr. let them go. But the video sits inside a much stranger archive — one that Kennedy has curated himself, publicly, across years. He posted the snake clip. He posted the rattlesnake clip. The bear story came out in his own words. There’s no reluctance here, no leaked footage or embarrassing candid. This is a man who thinks these moments reflect well on him, or at least reflect something worth sharing. That instinct might say more about his self-image than any of the individual incidents do.
