Can an AO affect the touch/creation animation?

I am really tired of having my AV's arm flying all over the place while I am building or shopping in a store or just flycam-ing about and touching various things. I have never seen an AO that changed/controlled this. I have asked a lot of experienced SL residents but noone I asked seemed to know. Or maybe it is just a dumb question.

So is there a way?

That is one of the animations that happens on the viewer, so scripts can't directly touch it. The best you can do is make all your other animations do something with the left arm's joints at a higher priority :/ The edit stuff is priority 2, so you would need 3 to prevent it from showing.