It's a nutty world out there, as one young girl in Texas recently learned the hard way.
A video of her attempt to rescue a squirrel from the kiddie pool in her backyard has gone viral after the squirrel decided to teach her a lesson about how no good deed goes unpunished.
The incident happened in the town of Lumberton, Texas about 90 miles east of Houston. A woman went out to her backyard to find a squirrel taking a dip in her granddaughter's swimming pool—understandable in Texas heat.
But the furry little guy seemed unable to leap up over the high walls of the pool to get back out again. She called her daughter outside to see and that's where things began going sideways.
As she put it to ViralHog:
"I called my daughter outside... and of course, being the animal lover she is, she had to attempt a rescue. The squirrel was not quite as grateful as she had hoped!"
Her daughter's rescue attempt definitely did not go according to plan!
Girl's Attempt to Help Squirrel Backfires || ViralHogwww.youtube.com
After being warned by her mother not to touch the animal, the girl cleverly uses a chair as a sort of life raft for the little guy. After an extensive game of chase—during which the girl yells over and over "I'm saving you! Let me save you!"—the girl finally gets the squirrel onto the chair.
Success!
But just as she's about to move him to safety, the squirrel decides it's had enough of all this. It lunges, first further up the chair, and then into the girl's face as she shrieks and runs away in terror—and the squirrel plops right back into the pool.
On Twitter, folks were laughing right along with the girl's mom.
In the end, the girl did end up making a second attempt and the squirrel was able to run back to his squirrelly little life.
Angry Natural World GIF by BBC EarthGiphy
All's well that ends well.
@joehas/X