It wasn’t just the dead bear.
Days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to taking a bear carcass from the side of the road and placing it in Central Park as a prank a decade ago, he said that has been picking up roadkill his “whole life” and once had a “freezer full of it” at home.
The comment came as the independent presidential candidate was leaving an upstate New York courtroom Wednesday where he had testified in a lawsuit seeking to exclude him from the state’s ballot in November.
The trial has focused on whether Kennedy improperly listed a residence in the New York City suburb of Katonah as his home address on his nominating petitions, when he has actually been living in the Los Angeles area since 2014.
TBH it’s not that weird to keep roadkill. That’s a thing that happens in more rural areas; a deer gets hit, game warden gets called, and then the person that hit the deer takes it home, field dresses, and butchers it. I personally know a few people that have done this, because it feels really wasteful to kill a deer and then just leave it to rot and be picked apart by crows and vultures.
Given that bears tend to have very high rates of parasitic infections though, I don’t think I’d do this with bear at all.
Depends on the roadkill, honestly. Deer as roadkill, especially if you’re the one who hit it (or saw it hit) isn’t too bad, because it’s already an animal normally eaten, and is reasonably fresh.
Now a raccoon that’s been on the side of the road for god knows how long…that’s a different story.
Yes, I should have specified that you need to see it hit, or come across it very, very shortly afterwards.
Tug at the fur. If it stays in, you’re good. If it comes out, then it’s been there too long.
🤮
If I didn’t see it get hit, or personally put it out of it’s misery after being hit, I ain’t risking it.
He used to keep roadkill in the fridge to feed his pet hawk. It wasn’t even his fridge, it belonged to friends who would let him crash there. They’d ask why not just buy chickens for the hawk to eat, but rfk is a fucking weirdo and thought that keeping roadkill in his friend’s fridge was a better feeding option for his hawk
i was raised by people like this. the correct answer is that he saved a buck or two.
The hawk likes the taste of roadkill/carrion better. My partner is trying to get in to falconry and has done an uncomfortable amount of research on the topic.
Yeah I’m confused about why this is such a big story. Dumping the bear in central park is kinda fucked up, sure, but even then is it really that huge of a story lol
I think that dumping a bear–in a densely populated area!–is a bigger story, but that one is more because there wasn’t any attempt made AFAIK to notify relevant authorities. You aren’t supposed to just pick up road-kill animals without permission, since that could easily lead to poaching. And bear, in many states, tend to have much more tightly restricted hunting, since there are far fewer of them than deer.
(I see black bears on a near daily basis where I live, but I’m in rural Appalachia.)