Does only human animal laugh? Though Aristotle observed so, researchers at the University of Hannover in Germany concluded that laughter has been evolving in primates over the last 10 to 16 million years, since at least the last common ancestor of humans and modern great apes.
Current Biology,
published online on June 4, 2009.
"Reconstructing the Evolution of Laughter in Great Apes and Humans"
The researchers analyzed the acoustics of tickle-induced vocalizations from infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, as well as tickle-induced laughter produced by human infants. The phylogenetic trees reconstructed from the acoustic data matched the well-established trees based on comparative genetics. The authors concluded that tickling-induced laughter is homologous in great apes and humans, and support the more general postulation of phylogenetic continuity from nonhuman displays to human emotional expressions.
The Wired Vision article says that the laughter continuously tells an animal's playmates that he is happy and merely fooling around, with no intention of picking a fight. This type of play builds social bonds in many mammals, including other primates and mammals like dogs and rats, which are also thought to emit sounds while being tickled.
(See "Laughter in animals" in Wikipedia.)
I will try to tickle animals for taming.
An adorable slow loris who loves getting tickled.
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