A man was filmed throttling a seagull on a beach pier after the bird swooped in and took his doughnut.
In the clip, the man can be seen holding the animal upside down by its neck before throwing it off the pier.
Passerbys were horrified by the incident, including a young woman from Torquay who filmed the scene.
She was eating outside the Pier Point with her mum and says the incident had been going on 'for quite a while' before she took her phone out to record it.
Speaking exclusively to Devon Live, she said: "It went on for such a long time.
"Nobody really reacted - everybody was just kind of dumbstruck - so I grabbed my phone and filmed the end of it.
"It looked like he had just bought the doughnuts from the Pier Point Chippy - then he put them up on the seawall to answer his phone and the gulls all descended.
"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 said: "It was odd that nobody reacted but it was such a weird thing to see. He didn't seem to care what people thought."
The man also had a McColls bag and what looked like a can of lager.
Seagulls are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which means it is against the law to injure or kill them.
But Devonians have long had a love/hate relationship with gulls and there is increasing concern about the creatures become ever more brazen in the hunt for food.
