Tourists watch in horror as man throttles seagull after it stole his doughnut

Sickening footage has captured a man grabbing a seagull and holding it upside down by its neck for over a minute.

Shocked tourists and locals walking on the promenade in Torquay, Devon watched the man brazenly grab at one of the birds after it had swooped on his doughnut.

He held the gull until it dropped his doughnut, which he then picked up and started eating again.

Onlookers behind the camera could be heard gasping in horror as he then flung the bird over the sea wall.

The incident was caught one camera by a young woman who was eating nearby. She told DevonLive it had been going on for “quite a while” before she started filming.

“Nobody really reacted – everybody was just kind of dumbstruck – so I grabbed my phone and filmed the end of it,” she told Devon Live.

The man had put his newly-bought doughnuts on the sea wall to answer his phone when all the birds “descended”.

The woman continued: “So he grabbed one by the throat and had it in his hand for over a minute and everyone sitting outside at Pier Point restaurant turned around and looked at him in horror – but he didn’t care.

“He just carried on. The gull dropped the doughnut and he just picked it up and carried on eating it and licking his fingers!

“When people were all staring he just said ‘It took my doughnut’ in a northern accent as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do. But it was horrible.”

Another onlooker admitted that it was “odd” nobody reacted as it was “such a weird thing to see”.

Seagulls are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which means it is against the law to injure or kill them.

It comes after “psychotic” seagulls have been causing terror by dive-bombing dog walkers and stealing food.