A KOALA that could not face rejection by a Victorian dairy farmer has chased her down as she tried to escape its clutches on her quad bike.

“He was in love with me and I rejected him so he chased me,” dairy farmer Ebony Churchill, 31, said.

The video of the koala chasing Ms Churchill as she tried to get away from it has been shared more than 11,000 times on social media.

“The koala surprised me,” she said.

Ms Churchill was moving a herd of cows on a property near Heywood, in western Victoria, when she saw the koala walking nearby. She assumed it was going from one tree to the next.

“He was close but then he started running towards me and I thought I better speed up (on the quad bike),” she said.

“But the more I sped up, the faster he got.

“I thought if I got further down the track, he would lose interest. I got to the end of the cows and couldn’t go any further so that’s when I bailed off the bike.

“They’ve got hard, sharp claws and I didn’t want to have him grabbing at my leg as I was on the bike.”

Ms Churchill lost sight of the koala as she got off the bike but found it latched on to the rear tyre.

“He sat on the tyre for a while and I didn’t want to upset him,” she said. “I started herding the cows on foot and when I looked back, he had got off the bike and was walking away.”

Ms Churchill said she was probably travelling about 10km/h along the muddy track when the koala was chasing her.

“They’re very active this time of year,” she said. “He was a gorgeous koala — really, really cute.”

She said she had seen the same koala a couple of times and it had followed her from a distance but it was the first time it had tried to chase her down.