Female rats like a different kind of tickling than males

Female rats like a different kind of tickling than males Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now By Hannah Thomasy May 14, 2026 at 9:00 am Share this: Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) For nearly a decade, Vincent Bombail has been tickling rats. It’s been a standard technique used in the study of animal happiness . But not all rats particularly enjoy the experience, data show. Female rats prefer gentler, more playful tickling than males, Bombail and his colleagues report April 15 in Biology Letters . The findings suggest that the same physical experience evokes a different emotional response in different individuals, potentially influencing the results of studies on animal happiness. “This research helps us understand these animals as playful but also rich and complex and having opinions,” says Daniel Weary, an animal welfare scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study. “Understanding the affective lives of animals is actually one of the coolest and most difficult questions there is in science,” he says. As early as the 1930s , researchers deliberately exposed rats to standardized negative experiences to study the physical effects of stress. Figuring out how to study positive experiences took longer. It wasn’t until the 1990s that researchers developed the standard tickling protocol, where a researcher flips a rat over, pins it on its back and tickles its belly. The protocol is intended to mimic the rough-and-tumble play of young male rats. When Bombail, an animal behavior researcher at Scotland’s Rural College in Edinburgh, started using the protocol, he almost