SEEKING System
The SEEKING system is one of the emotional systems as described by Jaak Panksepp. This is one of the most primary systems in all beings, it gives us life, the ability to survive and thrive in the world in front of us. It drives our behavior.
When our living body has a want or a need the SEEKING system kicks in and says "do something about it!" It encourages us to act, to perform known skills, whether instinctive behavioral action patterns or learned behaviors, to fulfill our need/want. As our body/mind has a need dopamine begins to increase in our body, this is the drive to act, the motivation to DO something. What we do is determined by the situation, our genetic predisposition, and our learning history.
The dopamine will continue to rise until our need/want is met, and happy feelings are released. But if our dopamine rises and rises and our needs are not being met, this becomes stressful and scary, it results in frustration as our body frantically scrambles to meet our need. If, in the end, our need is not met, we give up and become defeated. If this happens often, our dopamine will not rise as much in the future, our drive to act will be depleted. We will stop putting in effort, stop trying, become lethargic, depressed, and ultimately die. Unless we are able to rebuild our confidence in our dopamine cycle.
Horses have short, constant dopamine cycles. They search for food, foraging, finding it readily, eating it, feeling satiated, and the dopamine settles back down. This cycle is small but constant with horses as they are designed to forage and graze 24/7, usually spending around 18 hours of their day seeking resources. That's alot of investment in this dopamine cycle! Their cycle can get bigger if resources are harder to earn, water frozen under ice, yummy forage up high in trees or buried under snow. The horses have to work a little more, using their instinctive pawing behavior to earn their reinforcement.
Our training with positive reinforcement mimics and should match the cycle of a horse foraging in nature. Not exceeding their frustration level, not defeating them to the point of depression, but maintaining a light, joyful, motivation.
The SEEKING system is easily and often damaged or stifled by punishment, intentional or not. When the learner tries and fails, something goes wrong, the learner is discouraged not only from doing that particular behavior, but from trying at all. If bad outcomes are possible, the risk may outweigh the potential reward.
As positive reinforcement trainers, we want our horses eager, joyful, involved and engaged in our training. We want them to try new things, explore different options, grow, evolve, think, be curious, be present in their mind.
Some horses don't come by this naturally, others have learned through bad experiences or even traumatic experiences to shut down and internalize, to stop engaging. So how do we rebuild this effort? This desire to participate in their world?
Things that build the SEEKING system are things that get the horse engaged with thinking, exploring, and trying. So enrichment is one of our most valuable tools in building confidence in their SEEKING. New things that result in good things, will rewire the way the horse sees the world, rather than new being a potential threat.
We want to keep our training and enrichment small enough the individual horse can be successful, find joy in what they're doing, but encourages them to think a little. So for our blind, traumatized mare, this was as simple as putting her favorite treats in a box with the lid flipped shut but not closed. She just had to lift the lid and get a great reward. But for our experienced enrichment young mustang, we put tiny boxes inside big boxes, with bells, squeak toys, stuffed animals and duct tape it all shut. We let him tear it apart and explode the food everywhere and spend hours finding it all among the noises and colors and objects they're hidden in.
This can be done in our positive training easily, but we don't just want this in training, we want to develop it in every aspect of their life, which will speed up their confidence and our training.
Don't forget that horses are social, a confident horse friend can help show them what fun the world has to offer!