A British tourist was caught on camera biting a trader’s hand in Morocco as she tried to free a chicken from its cage.
The incident was filmed in Tangiers, northwestern Morocco, last month, and shows the woman surrounded by locals as they try to stop her breaking the seller’s cages.
The young woman rants and shouts at the market stall holders, calling them illiterate, swearing and sticking her middle finger up at the camera, as a crowd of people gather to see what it going on.
She then climbs on top of the plastic containers, trying to wrench it open and shouting at the seller. As he reaches to try to get her off the cage, she then appears to then bite his hand.
You can watch the bizarre incident here:
As the footage shows, the woman can be seen hurling abuse at the market sellers, saying ‘are you all that uneducated’ and ‘you can’t read’, while sticking her middle fingers up at the camera. Later in the video, the British woman can be heard shouting ‘you don’t treat animals like that’.
After the struggle, the woman was reportedly detained by the crowd before the police arrived, who then took her to hospital with ‘hysteria’ instead of arresting her, MailOnline reports.
The video of the incident has been viewed over a million times on social media and, naturally, it has received a number of responses from bemused viewers.
As one person pointed out:
She doesn’t seem to realise that those chickens mean income to this man and his family. #WhitePrivilege
Others wondered, if she wanted to free the chicken, why she didn’t buy it herself and let it go afterwards. While others were simply astounded at the woman’s ‘sense of entitlement’ and ‘superiority complex’.
Others added comments such as: ‘Go push your cultural beliefs in your own country, stay away if you don’t like it.’ While another added: ‘On behalf of the sane British public, I apologise for this simply atrocious behaviour.’
Though the woman may be concerned for animal welfare, and is perhaps campaigning for animal rights, others have called her behaviour ‘voluntourism’, where those privileged enough to be able to travel the world do so while trying to ‘influence’ and ‘educate’ cultures they do not fully understand, Morocco World News reports.
The market stall holder reportedly did not press charges against the woman after the incident.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.