We all have that friend who’ll snatch the final slice of Sicilian and shamelessly gobble it down with total disregard for the rest of the pizza-party attendees. This groundhog is that friend.


 

We haven’t seen urban dining this brazen since New York brought us pizza rat or that red-tailed hawk that murdered a pigeon in broad daylight on a Brooklyn sidewalk.

The carb-loving groundhog was filmed by Kristin Chalela Bagnell outside her home in Philadelphia. Entirely unfazed by the two dogs on the other side of the glass sliding door, the rodent spent an hour munching on a slice of pizza in a sort of food-obsessed trance.

"Before I recorded, we noticed that pizza was out in our backyard and we didn't know where it came from," Bagnell explained to CNN. "Then both of the dogs were very intently looking out the glass."

Bagnell has seen the woodchuck romping around the neighbourhood in the past, but never with a slice of pizza. Her video has since sparked others living alongside audacious woodchucks to share their photos:

Groundhogs are primarily herbivorous; when they aren’t chomping on pizza, they prefer to eat wild berries and grasses. Occasionally they will stray from their vegetarian diet and feast on insects, grubs and snails.

Human activity, particularly the expansion of agricultural areas, has benefitted woodchuck populations resulting in a surge of food availability and abundance. In many areas they are now considered nuisance animals as they raid crops and dig extensive burrows sometimes compromising building foundations.

A humorous report by the New Hampshire Legislative Woodchuck Committee written in 1883 describes the woodchuck as a “wayward sinner”, a “nuisance” and a “bore”. “It burrows beneath the soil, and then chuckles to see a mowing machine, man and all, slump into one of these holes and disappear.”

We can almost hear “Pizza Groundhog” chortling as he stares down dogs and human, barely pausing to take a breath.

Header image: Chag, Flickr