Trigger Stacking

During this difficult time of "social isolation" we are all stressed out.  Our dogs can be too.  Here's a little graphic to teach you about trigger stacking.

What normally happens in a dog’s day is that they meet a series of stress-inducing triggers - door bell ringing, loud noise on tv, stranger at the door, you drop a pan and make a loud noise, people shouting, strange dogs, etc. If you’ve socialized your dog and introduced him/her to these triggers when they were young (before 20 weeks of age), he or she will most probably learned that these things are nothing to be afraid of. If you didn't, you’ve got an uphill battle to show your dog that a strange man in a hat, wearing boots and glasses, holding a shovel is nothing to be afraid of!

In order to understand trigger stacking, you need to understand how cumulative stress affects your dog. Each time Rover is exposed to a trigger which causes him stress, his brain is bathed in stress hormones. Just as in the explosive volcanoes, stress can be allowed to accumulate. We all have a limit of how much stress we can handle, dogs included.  Eventually, Rover goes over  threshold and explodes by acting aggressively and possibly biting.

Trigger Stacking: One way to think of it is in terms of a cup; some dogs may have a large glass, others a tea cup and some a shot glass.  Each of these  ‘cups’ can hold a different volume of stress.  By continually filling thacup with stressful things, eventually the maximum volume is going to be reached and it spills over the edge.  That moment of spillage is the trigger that sets off intense reactions. Dogs that live with long-term stress will have a cup that is constantly filling up and so there is less room for more stress to fill it.  Trigger stacking is an involuntary occurance that puts your dog into auto-pilot to protect himself.

Know your dog, avoid stressful things, don't let too many stressors happen at one time.

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