section_path: Personal life/Treatment of dead animals
section_name: Treatment of dead animals
paragraph_text: Treatment of dead animals
  
  In July 2024, an image of Kennedy holding a charred animal carcass captured in 2010 surfaced in a Vanity Fair story, which alleged that the carcass belonged to a dog and that Kennedy ate it. Kennedy denied that he ate dog meat, and said the animal carcass in the picture was a goat. According to Snopes, the carcass in the photo is lamb. Kennedy had eaten dog, horse, and guinea pig meat before 2001, however.
  
  In August 2024, Kennedy released a video on Twitter, acknowledging that in October 2014 he placed a dead six-month-old bear in Central Park after initially planning to skin it for meat. Kennedy claimed that the bear had been hit by a car in front of him and that he ultimately abandoned the carcass for fear that it would spoil before he could preserve it, deliberately positioning the body to give the impression that it had been struck by a cyclist in Central Park. He released the video in advance of a story in The New Yorker that detailed the incident. At the time of the incident, the spectacle of a dead bear in a New York City park made the local news. A resulting necropsy by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation found that the death was caused by " blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision".
  
  In a 2012 Town & Country magazine profile of Kennedy's daughter Kathleen ("Kick"), she recounted a story about how her father—who, she said, liked to study animal skulls and skeletons—used a chainsaw to sever the head of a dead beached whale in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, then strapped the whale's head to the top of their minivan with bungee cords for the five-hour drive home, saying, "every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car" and they "had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us". In September 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement announced that it was investigating the incident.
  
  In July 2024, an image of Kennedy holding a charred animal carcass captured in 2010 surfaced in a Vanity Fair story, which alleged that the carcass belonged to a dog and that Kennedy ate it. Kennedy denied that he ate dog meat, and said the animal carcass in the picture was a goat. According to Snopes, the carcass in the photo is lamb. Kennedy had eaten dog, horse, and guinea pig meat before 2001, however.
  
  In August 2024, Kennedy released a video on Twitter, acknowledging that in October 2014 he placed a dead six-month-old bear in Central Park after initially planning to skin it for meat. Kennedy claimed that the bear had been hit by a car in front of him and that he ultimately abandoned the carcass for fear that it would spoil before he could preserve it, deliberately positioning the body to give the impression that it had been struck by a cyclist in Central Park. He released the video in advance of a story in The New Yorker that detailed the incident. At the time of the incident, the spectacle of a dead bear in a New York City park made the local news. A resulting necropsy by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation found that the death was caused by " blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision".
  
  In a 2012 Town & Country magazine profile of Kennedy's daughter Kathleen ("Kick"), she recounted a story about how her father—who, she said, liked to study animal skulls and skeletons—used a chainsaw to sever the head of a dead beached whale in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, then strapped the whale's head to the top of their minivan with bungee cords for the five-hour drive home, saying, "every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car" and they "had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us". In September 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement announced that it was investigating the incident.