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Your pup rolls over on its back, and you can’t resist giving their belly a pet or two. They kick their legs, but you can really tell if you scratched “the right spot” or they’re wiggling around because they’re feeling ticklish.
While dogs don’t giggle and wiggle their bodies to escape the prickly touch, they possess the same nerve endings on their skin. When someone touches the right spot on a dog’s body, they most likely feels a response similar to a feather-light movement across the skin.
Ticklish dogs: the dog scratch reflex
The scratch reflex is when nerve endings under the skin pick up a signal and send it straight to the leg muscles via the spine, completely missing out the brain. It’s a bit like tickling, in that it’s an involuntary reaction. It’s the same type of response as the knee-jerk reflex in humans – when a sharp tap just below our knee bone makes us straighten our leg.
Dogs also sometimes make the same scratching movement when a flea or something else is irritating the dog tickle spot. Just like doctors use the knee-jerk reaction to test our reflexes, vets can use the scratch reflex to check for signs of spinal damage in dogs.
Whether your dog likes it or not is entirely down to the individual experience. In a minute we’ll look at how you can use his cues to tell whether he’s having a good time or not.
Does your dog’s paw twitch and pull away if you pick it up? Perhaps wiping their paws after a muddy walk turns into a game of speed and quick reflexes to get the job done. When this happens your dog is probably feeling that knismesis sensation of tickling on their paws. They jerk their feet away in an involuntary reflex – just like when someone tickles our feet. But not all dogs’ feet are ticklish. Just like ours, some dogs’ feet are more ticklish than others.
If ticklish toes do make cleaning your dog’s feet difficult, a specialized paw cleaner like this one from Dexas might help. It’s had good reviews from owners whose dogs resisted the sensation of having their feet cleaned.
So we’ve seen that most of the reactions we get from tickling a dog tickle spot are involuntary reflex reactions. You may be wondering now whether dogs like being tickled and how to tickle your dog so that they enjoy it.
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You might have wondered are dogs ticklish anywhere in particular, like how some people only seem to have ticklish feet. If you want to know where a dog’s ticklish spot is, there are a few places to try that are almost certainly going to be sensitive and ticklish. In fact, the spots where your dog is ticklish are similar to common human ticklish spots.
Possible places where your dog is ticklish are: