The video was made on January 28, 2021 at Howell, Michigan, USA. The owners of this cat and lizard said: “Kitten and Rick have been together for eight years. Both are rescues”. The fact that they’ve been together for eight years, and were perhaps adopted together, appears to be the key to their relationship. In the same way that kittens are socialised to people to make them domesticated, these two very different species of animal have been socialised to each other. Which is why you see the lizard head-bobbing.
It does not take much research to find out that head-bobbing is a way that lizards communicate. Head-bobbing has various meanings in the world of lizards. And each species of lizard has its own pattern of head-bobbing and ‘push-ups’.
Male lizards bob their heads when performing a mating display to initiate courtship. Females bob their heads in response to accept. Head-bobbing can also be a form of dominance and aggression. These appear to be the main reasons for head-bobbing in lizards.
Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
My guess, therefore, is that the lizard in the video is relating to his cat companion as a female lizard and wants to mate with her! I wonder if the owners of these two animals have looked up, as I have, the meaning of head-bobbing in lizards? I don’t think this lizard wants to dominate or be aggressive towards his cat friend which, as mentioned, are the other two reasons for this behavioural trait. And therefore, I’m stuck with the answer that I have provided.
It would be very interesting to know how each party to this relationship relate to each other. Does the lizard see a species of animal different to itself? I don’t think it does. If it did, I don’t think he would be asking for sex! Perhaps he doesn’t realise that he is looking at a different species and cannot mate and procreate.
The cat does not get the message as they speak a different language. I wonder how the lizard responds to the rejection?
After many years of seeing interspecies friendships, it seems reasonable to suggest that when two animals of different species are raised together and become buddies, they regard the other as an animal of the same species as themselves.
SOME MORE INTERSPECIES FRIENDSHIPS:
