Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has added another weird encounter with an animal to his growing list.
President Trump’s conspiracy theorist Health Secretary took a trip to the Nez Perce Reservation in northwestern Idaho to meet with workers at a salmon hatchery. There, he got his hands on a lamprey, a jawless fish similar in shape to an eel but with rows of sharp teeth in a sucker-like mouth.
And despite the cultural significance of the animal to the tribe he was visiting, and the overtly terrifying vampire-like mouth, RFK Jr. let it latch onto his arm and give him a “hickey.”
He shared a series of images of his encounter on X, showing the fish’s sucker-like mouth affixed to his forearm. “Lampreys hickeys at the Nez Perce salmon hatchery in NW Idaho,” he wrote.
Not content with one mark from the fish, Trump’s health chief let it latch onto both his arms. He then upped the ante further, allowing two of the parasitic sea dwellers to chomp at his wrists. He also held a lamprey as it sucked onto another visitor’s arm.
The eyebrow-raising photo shoot with the parasitic fish is all the more jaw-dropping given that RFK Jr. has actually suffered from a parasitic infection in the past. “[A] worm… got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy admitted in 2012.
RFK Jr. lets a lamprey suck his arm. RFK Jr./X
Pacific lampreys hold deep cultural, spiritual, and subsistence importance for many Indigenous tribes across the Pacific Northwest, including the Nez Perce.
They hail the animal as a “first food,” a substitute when salmon stocks run dry. And despite the fish’s involvement in traditional ceremonies, there is no record of “hickeys” being culturally significant.
Kennedy said his mission was to restore the “availability of traditional foods on reservation lands,” namely salmon for many tribes in the region.
The mouth of a Sea Lamprey features 150 teeth and a tongue that is cerated. Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
This is not Bobby Jr’s first weird encounter with the animal kingdom. Perhaps his most famous run-in with Mother Nature came in 2014, when he found a dead six-month-old bear cub on a rural road.
He admitted to the story last year, saying that he intended to skin it for meat, then backed out and dumped the animal in Central Park—placing a bicycle on it to create the illusion that a cyclist had hit it.
Kennedy’s daughter, Kick, revealed in a 2012 interview that her dad once beheaded a dead whale and tied its head to the roof of their family minivan before embarking on a five-hour drive. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” she told Town and Country.
RFK Jr. with two of the eel-like creatures stuck to his skin. RFK Jr./X
Kennedy also may have dined on a barbecued dog in 2010 while in Korea, according to Vanity Fair. That was the same year that he received his dead brain worm diagnosis.
RFK Jr., a falconer who trains ravens, also “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks,” according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy.
“It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence,” she said in a letter to senators on the eve of his confirmation hearings to become the country’s next health secretary.
Owing to his perverse relationship with animals, Lawrence O’Donnell last year crowned Kennedy Jr. the “Jeffrey Dahmer of the animal kingdom.”