Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No...it's a boar - loose in a shopping centre

Imagine you mosey on down to the local shopping centre for a spot of retail therapy, and while you're there, casually minding your own business, all hell breaks loose as an unexpected and certainly uninvited visitor puts in an appearance - a boar.

The boar in the hairdressers (screenshot from France 2 television report)

For shoppers at a mall in the eastern French town of Frouard near the city of Nancy last week, that was exactly what happened.

Mid-afternoon last Tuesday the animal - reportedly weighing in at around 60 kilogrammes - caused panic among shoppers as it made its way along the aisles of a supermarket for several minutes.

"We were about to evacuate the store but the animal thankfully left without harming anyone," Grégory Gobin, the head of security, told TF1 news.

It then made its way to a nearby hairdressers whose clientele quickly fled allowing security guards to close the doors and lock the animal inside.

"It ripped apart the salon, climbed into the basins and was clearly distressed," Gobin said.

And an amateur video shows how the boar panicked in a scene that was surely as pathetic - in the true sense of the word - as much as it was comical of a wild animal trapped and terrified.

A vet was able to tranquilise the animal before it caused any more damage and it was removed and later destroyed.

France's boar population has risen rapidly in recent years. Statistics released in 2008 put their number at more than one million, compared with 250,000 in 1998.

A nationwide scheme was launched in 2009 to try to keep their numbers in check by increasing the number of hunting licences issued.