Remove game object while animation is playing breaks animation

I'm running the Unity native animation system and noticed the following issue. Given an animation tree like this:

body // character body sprite
- hand1 // a sword game object
- hand2 // a shield game object

I animated hand1 and hand2 directly on body. And when the game is running, I dynamically destroy hand1 and hand2, and recreate hand1 and hand2 from different game objects(for example two short swords), and the animation goes totally nuts. Is this an intended behavior? Or is there any way to make this work? Thanks!

 

The process (deleting bones then recreating them and adding them back into the rig) - is not expected behavior, so the results experienced isn't really expected behavior either.

Can the hands stay in the rig and only instantiate the weapons instead?