A Sheffield student spent an hour trying to get rid of a badger after he woke up to find the creature in his kitchen.
Baffled by the sight, Tom Coles, a medical student at the University of Sheffield, couldn’t understand how the badger accessed the student house in Crookesmoor on Tuesday.
The 23-year-old said he couldn’t recall leaving a door or window open before going to sleep.
He said: “I was like ‘no way’, at first. I just didn’t understand how a badger had got in.
“I found it quite funny if I’m honest, but then I remembered once being told that badgers are kind of vicious if you get on their bad side.
Tom said that before attempting to deal with the badger he called his dad’s friend John who used to work at a pet shelter.
He said: “I hadn’t got a clue how to approach it. I think I was lucky that it never got startled. It was really tame actually.”
John Palmer, 55, who lives in Sheffield, arrived at the house within 20 minutes to assess the situation.
By this point, the badger had made its way over to the side of the house, but was still in the kitchen.
Mr Palmer said: “What I do know about badgers is that you shouldn’t interrupt whatever they’re doing. Just stand well back. That’s what I told Tom and that’s what we did.”
According to the RSPCA people who encounter badgers in their gardens should remove what is attracting them, which can often be food or shelter.
Unsure whether the smell of the kitchen food bin had lured the badger indoors, Mr Palmer suggested they slowly lift it outside onto the front path.
“We’d been trying for about 15 minutes together, using various tactics,” he said.
“Once we picked the bin up, it took notice like that [signalling a click with his fingers], and followed us outside a metre or so.”
Mr Coles said once the bin and the badger were outside, it didn’t take long for the badger to lose interest and wander off down the path out of sight.
“That’s a lesson learnt I suppose. Note-to-self: better to sweat out of heat than sweat out of fear,” he added.
“I didn’t fancy my chances against those claws and I still wouldn’t next time either.”