In the event of exporting data from one database to another, even if you only export select tables using the --tables option, be sure to add --skip-triggers as well if you don't need them.

We use triggers to duplicate data between our demo databases but one of the triggers broke, breaking all the databases. After fixing the issue and re-importing all of the data from the main demo database we thought it had been fixed. I had forgotten to put in the --skip-triggers option though, so the triggers in the main demo database copied to all the sub-demo databases, creating a recursive loop. Lesson learned.

The error we were getting, just to note, was "Can't update table '<table>' in stored function/trigger because it is already used by statement which invoked this stored function/trigger." and caused a whole chain of databases to fail.