Fights among anoles are fairly common in nature, and we’ve had several previous posts documenting anole fights captured on film (1, 2, 3, 4). A casual browsing of YouTube reveals many more anole fights, mostly between male Anolis carolinensis (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Many of these videos use the Rocky theme music to set the tone. I was really enjoying watching these videos until I got to thinking that some of them might actually be staged. I browsed the comments to see if I could figure out if the fights were staged, but didn’t come up with any definitive proof (in a few cases, I added my own comment asking directly if the fights were staged). However, there are certainly people who have commented that watching these videos has inspired them to raise fighting anoles. What do you think? Do some of these fights look staged to you?
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I would be willing to bet that less effort goes into staging these videos than the amount of effort that goes into taking a single anole natural history photograph.
Probably true.
There are also a lot of staged videos of people feeding live rodents to their pet snakes on youtube, usually set to angry metal music. Frankly, these videos can be pretty disturbing. I would guess that a lot of the anole encounters on youtube are also staged. People can’t seem to resist provoking animals by poking them with a stick, tapping on the glass, or forcing them into close proximity with each other. Is this animal cruelty?
Staging fights definitely qualifies as cruelty in my view.