Triggers & Trigger Stacking

Understanding Triggers: An Important Concept for All Owners

Watch this 2 minute video by Donna Hill, a respected service dog trainer, to review the basics.

Triggers

A trigger can be something good or something not-so-good in the environment that changes your dog's arousal or excitement level, possibly leading to the undesirable ends of the hyperarousal scale. Some triggers are stronger than others.

Triggers, things that cause us to be more emotionally aware and on alert, change our arousal and vigilance levels to much higher than normal, and that, in turn, creates the stage for a possible disaster (Fenzi).

A trigger, in dog behavior language, is an addition to the environment that causes a dog to increase their awareness/fear/reactivity (Stillwell).

Components of a Trigger's Strength

We can adjust your dog's exposure to the trigger based on these three attributes. Distance is one of the easiest to manipulate.

Trigger Stacking

"Trigger stacking is what happens when multiple triggers come one after the other. Trigger stacking is bad. Trigger stacking causes disasters – no one trigger is enough but in combination….bad things happen.

Triggers stacking can be one low level stressor that goes on for a long time (stuck in a room with a spider for hours), several low level stressors that come one after the other (spider, followed by husband opening the door unexpectedly), or a situation where one trigger ends up being more intense than expected (spider climbing up my arm). Any of those possibilities can create a panicky response – outside the control of the animal. Remember, humans and dogs are both mammals with similar base emotions, so your responses to fear are likely to apply to your dog as well. Under circumstances where we are hyper alert, things that might have caused a typical startle under normal circumstances now risk a severe overreaction" Fenzi).

trigger stacking graph rescued by traini

Trigger stacking is defined as "Stress accumulation due to exposure of multiple triggers, either simultaneously or close enough in time that the dog’s reactivity has not returned to normal. For example If a sound sensitive dog who’s afraid of children hears a loud crash before he sees a child, he is more likely to bite than if he had met the child under calmer circumstances" (Stewart, BAT 2.0, P. 276).