why do most domestic animals enjoy being petted?
In: Biology
Petting isn’t the same for all animals, it involves stroking and touching them then adjusting the patterns of touch according to their responses.
In other words, the process of petting is trying to determine what kind of touch this particular animal enjoys.
And then you can ask why animals would like pressing, rubbing, stroking or rearranging hairs or feathers, which are the basic acts that we tend to do, and the first answer is that most animals engage in grooming or self-cleaning activities, there is a particular environment on their skin or in their fur or feathers that is good for them, and being in a complex environment may mess that up, and so having some other entity help you with that problem is nice.
Secondly, animals have nervous systems, which are attached to their skin, and highly complex and varying stimulation of that nervous system can produce different responses.
That’s almost tautological, but if you picture that animals are “built” for a particular combination of sensation and action, but have the potential to do a lot more, there are all kinds of potential responses that we can find that an animal never normally experiences in normal life, and if they also feel safe, the experience of novelty can be a positive experience.
So even if you’re dealing with a fish or a lizard, you can find a particular “hack” via touch, where they are able to enjoy some random sensation that they would never come across in the wild.
Not because they evolved to like being pruned of parasites or whatever, just because they’re a sensing acting being and you’ve managed to find some way of interacting with them while playing about that provides them an experience they could never get anywhere else. The fact that your lizard likes you patting their shoulders back and forth in order doesn’t need a sensible explanation, it’s just a specific quirk of that lizard and how their brain has developed to experience the world, that you happened to discover.
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