This slow-mo video of seagulls chasing a boy on the beach is the stuff of nightmares

"Gulls are scavengers," the travelling salesman says to Mrs Bundy in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

The travelling salesman is entirely correct. Gulls are scavengers. They pillage our beaches unrelentingly.

Sometimes, in their pursuit of fish and chips and ice cream, they cause bloodshed. They attack people, pets, and get drunk on ants, deranged and delirious, rampant in their hunger.

It goes without saying - you would think - that actively feeding the seagulls, then, would be inadvisable at best.

And yet...

(For the full impact of this, play it with the sound on).

The now famous young boy perhaps failed to read the cacophony of headlines that have come before him, and held aloft a tasty morsel as if offering up his soul to a priest.

He ended up pretty much re-enacting a scene from Hitchcock's movie.

It happened on Seal Isle City in New Jersey, in the US.

Patrasha, who posted the video, has yet to reply to our request for comment, so we're not completely sure whether she's the boy's mum.

Her Twitter bio currently reads: "I'm not his mom".

...

The video has, at the time of writing, been shared nearly 10,000 times.

Plenty of people have commented - some say that the footage is hilarious, others are a little concerned about the child, who, as the film ends, is still running into the distance, being chased by the gulls.

Same.

We all did tbh.

More: David Cameron declares war on seagulls, definitely has his priorities right