29/11/2025
Good one!
If you follow our page you’ll already know this: how you respond to your animal can strengthen a behaviour or reduce the chances of it happening again. That’s basic operant conditioning.
But sometimes a behaviour keeps showing up even when you’re not reinforcing it. It’s not magic — it’s rehearsal.
Rehearsal is reinforcement.
Every time an animal performs a behaviour, the neural pathway behind it strengthens. It doesn’t need you to reward it; the animal’s own brain chemistry can do the job.
Dopamine, the neurotransmitter driving motivation and the pursuit of rewards, fires when an animal anticipates or seeks something that previously paid off. That dopamine surge keeps the animal coming back for another go, even if the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Endogenous opioids, the body’s natural pain-relief and “feel-good” chemicals, can also kick in during certain patterns of behaviour, especially repetitive or high-arousal actions. These opioids can make the behaviour intrinsically reinforcing because they literally make the animal feel better while doing it.
And cortisol, the stress hormone, complicates things further. Sustained elevated cortisol can push animals toward displacement or repetitive behaviours as a coping strategy. The relief they feel when performing these behaviours pairs with those opioid releases, making the loop even harder to break.
So if a behaviour seems to persist “on its own”, it’s not stubbornness or defiance. It’s neurobiology. And unless you change the environment, the stimulus, the stressor, prevent or interrupt the rehearsal and give the animal the skills or environment to run a new sequence the behaviour will keep strengthening itself from the inside out.
