What are Triggers?
Any stimulus that causes your dog to become stressed and display stress signals is a trigger. Triggers can literally come in all shapes and sizes. Your dog could be triggered by another dog, kids, cars, new novel objects or even specific sounds or smells.
Stress Signals
Stress signals fall into several categories
- avoidance
- displacement
- distance increasing
Trigger Stacking
Triggers are not singular events that our dog experiences in isolation.
Have you ever experienced a walk where you and your dog encountered one dog and you were able to keep your distance and avoid it with your dog barely noticing it. Great! Success!
Now a person surprises you by getting out of a parked car on the street, but you are able to get away quickly with only a small grumble from your dog. Around the next block, you come upon a dog barking from behind a fence in their backyard. Normally your dog could pass this, but today your dog “goes crazy” “losing his mind”.
Why? What happened? Why do your dog’s reactions seem random sometimes?
The answer is Trigger Stacking. Your dog was able to keep it together for the first trigger, the reaction to the second trigger was a bit more pronounced, then finally on the third your dog went over their threshold and reacted.
This is a common scenario that we frequently see. It happens to us humans as well. Image this, you start out the day by making your cup of coffee to drink on your way to work. On your way out the door you drop and spill it. You are already late, so you don’t have time to go back in and make another one.
When you get to work, you find out there are no close parking spaces and it is raining. When you get settled in at your desk, you find you have an email from a co-worker complaining about something silly that sends you over the edge.
Welcome to trigger stacking. Any one of those individual things you could handle without becoming upset but the stacking effect pushes you past what you can handle in that moment and you have a reaction. A reaction that later you likely wish you wouldn’t have had.
This is exactly how our dogs feel when we walk them on a daily basis past their triggers. They become more and more reactive to the perceived threat of these triggers. The stacking effect causes this reactivity to increase and generalize becoming worse and worse over time.