Presidential hopeful, brainworm survivor and dead bear relocator Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a weird guy. His campaign has remained sort of in the spotlight because of his name and because of the strange shit he does and says. Well, after this week’s dead bear in Central Park incident, we’ve got a new weird RFK Jr. fact that is very fitting: the man collects roadkill.
Kennedy told reporters that he had been picking up roadkill his “whole life” and at one point he had a “freezer full of it” at his house, according to the Associated Press. God, I love this guy. The comments from the independent presidential candidate came following a hearing in an upstate New York courtroom where he had testified in a lawsuit seeking to exclude him from the state’s ballot in November.
In a social media video posted earlier this week, Kennedy told comedian and right-wing weirdo Roseanne Barr that he planned to skin the bear, which was in “very good condition,” according to the AP. He went on to say, “I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, he didn’t say what the hell he was going to do with it. Well, on August 7 reporters asked him if he picked up other roadkill, and much to my delight, he has.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life,” Kennedy told the group. I had a freezer full of it.”
He even boasted that the bridge was over “a thousand cubic feet,” according to The Daily Beast, but that turned out to be hyperbole (thank Christ).
That being said, a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign confirmed to the AP that he wasn’t joking about the existence of a roadkill fridge.
She said that’s how Kennedy — a falconer who trains ravens — feeds his birds. She added that he no longer has the 21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator, which had been in New York’s Westchester County suburbs.
A lot of this strangeness has overshadowed why Kennedy was in court in the first place. Basically, New York wants him off the ballot because he allegedly lied on his nominating petitions, saying the New York City suburb of Katonah was his primary residence. In actuality, he has lived in the Los Angeles area since 2014, the AP reports. Oops.
Roadkill is a terrible fact of life anywhere vehicles and nature meet (which means, pretty much everywhere.) As many as one million animals are killed in road strikes every year, but getting flattened isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an animal due to our addiction to cars, As Bloomberg explains:
There’s the fact that road noise is driving songbirds away from important migratory stopover areas. There’s what scientists have called the “moving fence” of traffic, this impermeable wall of vehicles that prevents animals like elk and pronghorn from migrating across the American West and reaching their winter range. There’s the fact that road salts, which we dump on highways in quantities that beggars belief, are turning freshwater ecosystems brackish. Half the lakes in the Midwest are experiencing long-term salinization, which is an ominous phrase.