A swan in Macedonia is the latest animal victim of human beings driven to idiotic extremes by the desire for a good selfie.
A Bulgarian tourist visiting Lake Ohrid was photographed pulling the hapless swan out of the water as a prop for a selfie, the Macedonian International News Agency reported.
Macedonian resident Nake Batev just happened to be at the lake when he saw the woman -- whom he did not know -- roughly handling the bird and snapped his own photographs of the horrific scene.
“I was just walking by when I noticed her posing and grabbing for her friends to take the picture,” Batev told The Huffington Post via Facebook. “It was just a second and in the next moment I was running and yelling for her to let go.”
Then, Batev said, the woman went back to her friends and walked off.
The news agency reported that the woman killed the swan, noting that witnesses said the bird was motionless after she was finished taking pictures. However, Batev told HuffPost that the swan actually swam away.
Though swans are frequently aggressive toward humans, swans at Lake Orhid have become used to humans and are fairly docile as a result, the news outlet noted.
The swan’s possible death comes less than a month after a mob of selfie-crazed beachgoers in Buenos Aires killed a small dolphin by hoisting the animal out of the water and passing it around. Days later, a man in Florida was caught on camera yanking a shark from the water by the tail for a photo op.