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Apparently many rats like being tickled. It stimulates them in much the same way that rough-and-tumble play with other rats does. Except that in rat tickling, a human hand takes the place of another rat.

You can tell that rats enjoy it because they will preferentially approach humans that tickle them. (They can distinguish individual humans!) They emit little pleasure vocalizations. They go to locations where they have been tickled before. Tickling can be used as a reward in getting them to learn new tasks. And rats that have been tickled show less fear and stress around humans.

https://ag.purdue.edu/ansc/gaskill/resources/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0175320

https://www.jove.com/t/57190/tickling-a-...1635638949

They even have a little online class in rat-tickling that you can take (I think that it's aimed at people who keep laboratory animals, but anyone can take it).

http://storage.googleapis.com/ecourses/R...html5.html

Maybe someone could invent a rat trap that attracts them via offering a mechanical version of the tingles.

We've got a dog that rubs his back against the low-hanging limbs of shrubs and small cedar trees in the woods, because he likes the ticking sensation.