Upside Down Toast: An Explanation About Trigger Stacking

​Let’s start off with a little bit of a story. 

Sarah wakes up, and realises her alarm didn’t go off. Yikes! She rushes to get ready for work, and turns up late, EXTRA late, because of road works - to which Estelle is not impressed but gives her some grace. 
The day runs pretty smoothly, but Sarah steps in some dog poop (an occupational hazard), and the fuel light comes on in the van on her way home. 
Getting back, she finds there is no dinner prepared so settles on having some toast before bed. As she’s going to sit at the table, one of her pieces of toast slips off the plate and lands face down on the floor.

Sarah lets out a very loud expletive, goes to pick up the toast, and promptly bursts into tears.

Her partner knows better than to comment about how it is, ‘Just a piece of toast.’

What the story above demonstrates is a human example of what is called trigger stacking. Every single stressor, or trigger, (which has been underlined), on its own, is not enough to warrant a meltdown, but when all compressed into one day… well… bring on the waterworks.

​So you may have recognised yourself in the above story, but did you know that this is something your dog experiences too?

As described by the American Kennel Club: ‘Trigger stacking refers to a phenomenon in which a dog experiences multiple stressful or scary situations within a short timespan. As a result, a dog may feel overwhelmed and exhibit a large reaction to an otherwise minor stressor.’

We have all had moments when we thought that perhaps our dog was overreacting to the child on their tricycle, or that the noise from the neighbour shouldn’t have made them bark so many times. But let’s break it down by having a second story time.

Xena the border collie lives in a household where she can hear dogs barking during the day. 
Upon trying to say hello to her favourite humans she gets told off for coming inside without being asked. 
The household cat zooms out from under her nose while she’s doing a perimeter sniff. 
On her evening walk around the street, she has to walk past another dog while she’s on lead. 
This is a dog she has seen many times before, but tonight, she lunges and snaps as they cross paths, giving all parties, humans and dog, a pretty big fright.

The human is left pretty confused as to what set Xena off, ‘It was just Billy from across the road’.

But it’s the same as the first story, and Billy is actually Xena's version of the toast that hit the deck. 

Before we get into some more explanation, we need to understand a little bit about thresholds. 

THRESHOLD
Noun: the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.

Every person and dog has a stress threshold, under which they can function normally. If that threshold is exceeded, there is a failure to cope and we can see some intense behaviours.

Every time your dog experiences a type of trigger, it increases the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, present in their body. And an increase in those hormones takes them closer to the threshold of not being able to function rationally.

These hormones can take up to 72 hours to leave the system. 

If your dog reacts every day to the postie, there is always an increased level of stress hormones in their body, and other, smaller seeming things might put them over the edge. 

Even something as simple as constant barking from the neighbouring dogs can reduce the amount of what your dog can handle before the metaphorical ‘upside down toast’ sets them into a state. As a visual aid, read through the handy 'Trigger Stacking' Infographic put together by ABC Dogs.

Another thing to remember is that every individual’s limit is just that, INDIVIDUAL. What may seem like something small to one dog, could be a very big deal to yours, and it’s important to keep that in mind. 

Approaching the behaviours our dogs show us with compassion and understanding is the first step to knowing what we need to do to help them cope, in what can be a pretty overwhelming world to live in.

Think about what you can do in your dog’s environment to help them relax, where you can take them to ensure that they have pleasant outings, and the types of interactions your permit them to have with people and other dogs.

Remember, it’s never ‘Just a piece of toast’.

Authored by Sarah Endres
Dog Trainer and Behaviour Advisor