pettable

Though peacocks are pretty, they are by no means pettable.

Despite their intimidating size and name, they're harmless and even pettable.

Tuesday night, performing two tunes he already knew proved too much for our pretty blue-eyed boy with the pettable hair.

To unsuspecting eyes these mongoose relatives can seem eminently pettable.

The boots were soft, crepe-like leather, wrinkled and pettable.

The leather looked soft, pettable, held in place with small silver buckles going from just above his ankles to his very upper thigh.

Henry J. Stern, the Parks Commissioner: A pettable pit bull.

The touch folks gravitate toward lamb's ears and chenille plants with plenty of pettable leaves and floral parts for fondling.

Their ears look so adorably soft that they could have been manufactured for Hamleys; their snouts are as smooth and pettable as a labrador’s; their beady little eyes like buttons.

If all this leaves travelers longing for their own pets, they can partially soothe the ache with a visit to one of Tokyo's cat cafes, where resident pettable felines wander freely among the customers.

The law applies only to warm-blooded animals and until now the secretary of agriculture has restricted it to cats, dogs, monkeys, hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs - in short, to the pettable, not the pestilential.

Little Jason was old enough to have known that he should leave a wild animal strictly alonelet alone never to mess with a skunkbut the skunk had been so cute, and seemed so harmless, so pettable.

In fact, he who acquires a Gordon Setter owns a rare combination: an aristocrat of ancient lineage and great beauty, a companion of keen intelligence and hunting ability, a loyal family guard and, as one authority puts it, "a most pettable dog!"

Similarly, we should not cry too much for Victor Hugo that Disney has made of his gruesome hunchback a highly profitable, pettable gnome; other classics (Jane Austen's "Emma," which was turned into "Clueless" in 1995, comes to mind) have undergone much more radical surgery and survived to tell the tale.