Proprioception And Domestication Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication Mammals respond to touch; mammals need other mammals touching them for them to grow up as empathic mammals. A child raised with no mammalian touch is feral, as only their amyglydal receptors develop. I believe the starting point for domestication is caging an animal, then giving it food and water and others of its kind to socialize with it but most importantly, a human mammal touching the animal with the animal not biting back that leads to domestication. Mammal-child rearing by humans is key. Growing up around humans and having litters and allowing them to be handled by humans is the key to domestication. The rest is weeding out bad traits: feral animals don't get to reproduce, tame ones do and over time the feral ones die out. The most important thing for a mammal is Proprioception- one's ability to sense the whole of itself. Take human babies- they are touched from head to toe on a daily basis to lead to an inner understanding of where they end and where the outside starts. A good analogy for you is our backs, which are mostly insensitive to touch as they don't get touched normally. Raising a feral animal from birth and touching it regularly leads to it's sense of itself.
I don't buy what you said about the back. The rest makes sense, but I would say the back is probably touched about as much as the butt.
