One of the profounder pleasures of life is being able to scratch oneself where it itches. By analogy this should apply to all creatures (after all, you have probably provided satisfaction in your own career by scratching the head of some animal like a pet turtle that cannot do it itself). It is a universal rule that every living thing gets itches (we assume, anyway, though we don't really know about snakes or alligators or spiders), and it is also obvious that not all species can deal with that. Herbivores like horses and cattle have tails to drive away flies from an obvious part of the body that needs swishing and scratching, flies themselves are able to manipulate their legs to groom and scratch, pigs wallow in mud, a goose can do amazing things just with its beak on that extensile neck. But what about hedgehogs, porcupines, and armadillos? Obviously, flexibility counts to a large extent, although one can hardly count earthworms, who can rub their whole bodies but don't have brains enough to know that.
Traditional models of evolutionary hierarchies that are based on developmental improvements basically brain-based, but also functional, such as feathers as opposed to scales, wings as opposed to fins, do not cover the basic question of how satisfied is an animal with its existence, how well adapted is it to its environment -- including being enslaved to human beings? A cat, for example, can pretty much scratch and lick its entire body, except for the back of its neck; so cats are very contented animals for the most part and only need human beings for the sake of scratching the backs of their necks. Dogs are very similar though not as nimble. We will go even farther by saying that human beings are not able to lick their own private parts, which causes so much social trauma and legal sanction about unnatural behavior when one tries to recruit a helper (monkeys have that problem too but don't have any trouble dealing with it except for the scorn of the people who get their kicks out of watching them do it).
So what is the point of these observations? We at the Academy had all noticed this in our lives, but it became clear to us after a long session in the faculty bar that our hostess was not able to deal with the peanuts we had dropped into her cleavage. Was it a cultural problem or was it more symbolic of a deeper predicament? What, we surmised, if a living being was not able at all to reach promptly to rectify a bodily irritating phenomenon? Hence grew the new science of Prurigology (and its sprititual counterpart Prurigomancy), which is the science of Itchology.
Since this is such a touchy subject, it will be put before the whole board of the Academy with the purpose of establishing it as a new project under the aegis of our biology curriculum. We are looking for researchers interested in furthuring investigation into the true evolutionary status of species based on what proportion of their bodies they can touch and scratch and also the logistics of retrieving a peanut from a bra.
Academy of Arts and Imbecility