Broken wing Man attacked gull with walking stick after burger snatch
AMAN reportedly smacked a seagull with his walking stick after it snatched a burger in Bristol city centre.
Five police officers attended the scene in Broadmead at around 11.30am yesterday. They could be seen talking to an employee of the Menkind gift shop.
He was holding a seagull wrapped in a towel just outside the store.
Another worker at the shop said minutes earlier, a man in his late 20s had been walking along Broadmead, a burger in his hands, just outside the shop.
“A seagull flew down and pulled the burger out of his hands,” the worker said.
“But then this older guy, in his late 50s at least, hit the seagull with his walking stick. It was a wooden walking stick with a big metal ball on the end.
“He hit the seagull and broke its wing, and it couldn’t fly.
“The guy who did it wasn’t even with the guy who’d had the burger. The one who’d lost his burger just carried on walking.
“All he did was shake his hands in the air in frustration at his lunch being stolen.
“The man who attacked the seagull had been sitting on the bench, he’d seen it take the burger, and he was obviously just a very angry man.”
The shop worker said the gull was hit with the stick before it had a chance to eat the burger.
“All the other gulls ended up having the burger,” he continued. “The injured seagull was flapping round on the ground, and the guy went to attack it again with his stick. It half-flew away, but it couldn’t really, because its wing was broken.
“He ran after it, but my colleague got a towel from the back and picked the seagull up with the towel so the guy couldn’t attack it anymore. Then the guy started shouting at my colleague.
“He got more and more aggressive towards us, to the point he told me I was a dead man. I said, ‘Leave it alone, it’s just an animal.’ That kind of triggered him even more, I think.”
The Menkind employee said police took the gull away and moved the alleged attacker on from the area, but he reportedly returned within minutes of the officers leaving.
“He was stood at the top of the street for half an hour, just shouting abuse at us,” the shop worker said.
In 2018, a man who killed a seagull when it tried to steal his chips received a curfew. John Llewellyn-Jones, from Cardiff, “smashed” the bird against a wall during a trip to Westonsuper-Mare.
Llewellyn-Jones was found guilty of breaching the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. He was sentenced at North Somerset Magistrates’ Court to a 12-week curfew.
The RSPCA said at the time: “He cared more for his chips than what he did to the gull.”