True Enough

Working in nightclubs has never been for the weak. Daily fights, drunkenly emboldened Karens, and general messiness are par for the course and part of the reason I love working in the industry- it’s literally impossible to have a boring shift. Some nights, however, go so sideways they stick to your memory like glitter in your hair, following you from the bar to your bed and morphing into sleep paralysis demons that remind you you’ve seen some shit.

Saturday, 13 December 2025. Westside Rodeo. Chaos reigned. It was the last weekend before Christmas, and people were acting up in ways that would never be permitted at home for the holidays. By the time the paramedics and police rolled up (again), I figured it was the usual drunken fight, a patron unconscious, maybe someone dramatically insisting they were “totally fine” while spewing like the kid in The Exorcist. I was so wrong.

As it turns out, a girl quite literally bit off a man’s tongue. On the dancefloor.

Yeah, I know.

How?? Why?? We were left to fill in the blanks. The obvious initial assumption was self-defense- he tried to kiss her without consent, and this was her immediate, effective response. Fair enough, but the logistics are dubious at best. How did he get his tongue far enough down her throat to facilitate that kind of damage before she pushed him off or called for help? There were at least ten security guards and 150 nosy bystanders nearby; surely this wasn’t the only viable course of action. 

Maybe it was an accident. Maybe they were kissing, and someone bumped her, startling her into a knee-jerk (chomp-down) reaction that ended in the unfortunate amputation. Even then, how hard do you have to bite to fully sever a tongue? That’s not an involuntary reflex. That’s a choice.

There’s been no official report, so for now, the story lives rent-free in my head. Unanswered, unconfirmed, and deeply unsettling.

This is where it gets interesting. 

A week later, I was back home, getting my nails done by one of my best friends, recounting this tongue-biting tale as we traded service industry war stories and commiserated over the various crazies we encounter daily. She was absolutely mortified (valid) and insisted that there must be more information out there.

Up until then, I hadn’t bothered to look into it any further. So I pulled out my phone and searched what I figured would lead to either answers or a blissfully desolate Google page. My expectations were minimal, hoping for, at best, a two-sentence police report. 

Instead, I got… this.

Not coverage on the incident in question, but instead of a nearly identical situation, only way more violent, way more chaotic, and way less… digestible.  

1 August 2019. Leith Walk. 

Bethaney Ryan, 27, bit off part of James McKenzie’s tongue in a street brawl, and the reason it couldn’t later be surgically reattached is both jarring and hilarious.  

Late that night, a verbal argument erupted between Ryan and McKenzie as they passed each other on the street. Ryan reportedly tried to walk away, but McKenzie, undeterred,  kept pushing, escalating it into a full-on street brawl that drew in nearby bystanders, mostly drunk and bored pub rejects already on smoke. The altercation reached its climax when he rushed her with a clenched fist, clearly ready to throw hands. In a bid to defuse the situation, Ryan shoved him and then, for reasons known only to her, leaned in to kiss him. Why he leaned in too remains unclear. Maybe he thought it was foreplay. Either way, she committed to the bit, clamping down and biting clean through McKenzie’s tongue, slicing off a ~2cm x 3cm chunk of pure muscle.

As far as guerrilla-coded defense tactics go, it was wildly effective, but even she couldn’t have predicted what happened next.  

Mere milliseconds after McKenzie turned and spat out the severed morsel, but just before he could retrieve it, an opportunistic seagull swooped down and scooped the savory piece of tissue right up off the pavement and straight into its mouth (beak?). 

The reports read like a comic strip. Picture it: McKenzie, mid-lurch, reaching down toward his own discarded appendage, only for a demon gull to dart in under his hand, snatch the fleshy souvenir, and fly off into the night, leaving him frozen in tongue-tied bewilderment.

The court report put it plainly:

…[Mr.] McKenzie continued to be aggressive towards [Ms.] Ryan and he approached her again with “a clenched fist”. [Prosecutor] Ms Dickson said: “Miss Ryan, somewhat oddly, responded to that by pushing him on the body and kissing him. She kissed him on the lips and during the course of that she bit through his tongue which caused a piece of his tongue to be removed. Mr McKenzie walked off and spat a part of his tongue out at which point the piece of muscle was picked up by a large seagull that made off with the piece of tongue.” 

Though treated for a severe lingual laceration, no reconstructive surgery could be performed (á la hungry gull), and McKenzie was left with permanently damaged and disfigured.

The seagull itself is what turned this story from a local oddity into international clickbait. Gulls may be permanent residents along Leith Walk and across Edinburgh, but eating a chunk of human flesh is far outside their normal behaviour. European herring gulls are famously adaptable, opportunistic feeders: research shows they routinely exploit human environments, scavenging dropped snacks, food waste, and other easy wins rather than catching fish as they had before the advent of cold pavement chips and Greggs. 

Still, convenience doesn’t equate to preference. Studies show that even gull chicks raised on urban scraps still choose natural marine foods like fish and mussels when given the option, underscoring that their reliance on human clumsiness is driven by access, not appetite. Gulls have also been observed using human behaviour as cues,  preferentially pecking at items people have touched or eaten, which may explain how this one mistook kissing for consumption. So, while gulls do have a well-known appreciation for discarded leftovers, eating a piece of human tissue remains firmly outside the species’ usual dietary repertoire. This wasn’t starvation or desperation, but simply opportunism colliding with an exceptionally cursed set of circumstances in a city where even the wildlife has boundary issues.

In the end, Ryan pleaded guilty to assault causing serious injury, and the legal proceedings concluded in a two-year supervision order and mandatory drug treatment rather than a prison sentence. The sheriff cited the nature of the confrontation and the contents of psychological and social reports as mitigating factors in a ruling that quietly reframed one of Edinburgh’s strangest street fights as less a tale of random savagery and more an unfortunate clash of bad judgment and terrible timing.

For the victim, though, the outcome is permanent: a missing piece of tongue, a story no one would ever willingly tell (at least without a notable speech impediment), and the deeply demoralising and humiliating distinction of having lost a fight to both a stranger and a seagull.