This may be "The Hypnoglyph", a short story by the poet John Ciardi, originally released under the pen name of John Anthony, as per this SF&F SE question.
Maddick flushed a moment, then pursed his lips almost imperceptibly
and shrugged. “Well, what’s it for.?” he said. He held the thing in front of
him and watched his fingers stroke it.
Jaris chuckled again. “It’s for exactly what you’re doing. The thing is
irresistible. Once you’ve picked it up, your thumb just automatically strokes
that little hollow, and it just automatically hates to stop stroking.”
....
"The women of the proper clan work these things, and the men set them out in the forests. As you might suppose, the men are a rather scrawny lot, and would starve soon enough if they had to depend on their own muscular prowess as hunters. These gadgets take care of all that, however. The animals, with their extremely high tactile suggestibility, come through the forest and find one of these things in their way. They begin to stroke it and feel it, and they just can't stop. The men don't even kill them; all slaughtering is handled by the ruling clan of women. The men simply wait till the animal has worked itself into the right state, and then lead it back to the slaughtering compound—still under hypnosis of course."
"Of course," Maddick agreed, his fingers working softly and rhythmically.
And it is implied that a bit more is done than just taking control.
The women on the planet where the hypnoglyph was taken are cannibals, and the explorer's wife plans to eat Maddick.
I remembered us having had this one on the SF&F SE (twice, actually), so I searched for a few different keywords until [story-identification] trance got me what I wanted.
You can read it at archive.org in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1953.
