Click-2-Heel

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Click-2-Heel Click-2-Heel is a dog training business based in Bracknell Berkshire.

Offers Puppy Training, Essential Life Skills, Recall and Leadwork Classes, General Pet Obedience, Online Training, Hoopers, Competitive Obedience, Scentwork, 1-2-1 Training and Behaviour Consultations and Residential Training We are a team of experienced dog trainers and behaviourists and promote science based training. Our aim is to give dog owners the knowledge they need and help develop their practical skills so that they can achieve their training goals. Di who founded Click-2-Heel is an advanced training winner Crufts Obedience Championships and is a prominent figure in the dog sports world giving seminars internationally. All of these services are designed to help you have a well-balanced, socially confident dog, who is a joy to share life with.

02/10/2026

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the smiley face - perhaps something to do with growing up in the rave era!

But did you know the famous yellow smiley dates all the way back to 1963, when it was created by graphic designer Harvey Ball? He later came up with World Smile Day - a day simply about kindness and making someone smile.

And who better for me to share today than Eazi Peazi - OB CH Lupitoonz Eazi Peazi. Eazi was an Obedience Champion, but more importantly she was a dog who absolutely loved life and lived it to the full. She was full of character, regularly looked completely ridiculous and always made me smile.
I lost her last year at the grand age of 14, but photos like these still make me laugh every time I see them. I’m not entirely sure she mastered the traditional smiley face… but she certainly gave it a pretty good go! 😁

So, for World Smile Day, let’s fill the comments with dogs who make us smile.

📸 Show me a photo of YOUR dog that always makes you smile.

Beautiful, silly, upside down, tongue out or completely ridiculous - anything goes!

25/09/2026

Following on from my recent post about adolescence and noise, here's another way I like to use sound within training.

We spend a lot of time teaching behaviours at home or in relatively controlled environments. But ultimately, we want those same behaviours to be available when we're out in the real world - walking through a town centre, training in a park, at a class, or simply somewhere with people, traffic and everyday life happening around us. So adding background sound can be a useful and very normal progression in our training.

If my dog can respond to familiar cues with the usual household noises going on around them, what happens when I add birds, traffic, people talking or children playing? I'm not necessarily making the behaviour itself any harder. I'm changing the environment in which I'm asking for it.
And that's an important part of generalisation.

At the same time, particularly during adolescence, this gives me a lovely opportunity to build positive learning histories around sound. I can combine noises with training, movement, play, food and familiar games - things the dog already enjoys and understands.

But not all sounds will have the same meaning.

Two sounds played at exactly the same volume don't necessarily present the same level of difficulty. One may barely register, while another may already have a learning history attached to it. That's exactly what happens in this video. We start with birds, which I expect this dog to find relatively easy. When the sound changes to people talking and laughing - something he has a history of barking at from the garden - his response changes too.

That bark is information. It tells me that the picture has just become more difficult. So I adjust what I'm doing. I become more animated, add movement and increase my rate of reinforcement to help him continue engaging with me and the activity.

If he were becoming increasingly worried rather than able to re-engage, I'd make the sound easier rather than simply trying to make the training more exciting. So although I'm thinking about positive experiences around sound, I'm also doing something much more fundamental:

I'm helping familiar behaviours become more fluent as the world around the dog changes.

With firework season approaching, it's a particularly useful time to think about the learning histories we're building around sound - but this is something I would incorporate into training throughout the year.

18/09/2026

Adolescence can bring changes in how dogs respond to the world around them. Things that previously went unnoticed can suddenly become worth listening to - and sometimes reacting to.
With firework season approaching, now is a really useful time to start thinking about the learning histories we're creating around sound.

If you haven't started already, now is a good time to begin introducing firework recordings quietly in the background while your dog is doing something they enjoy. We can gradually build positive experiences around those sounds, always working at a level where the dog is comfortable.

But we can also think beyond recordings. Everyday life gives us lots of opportunities to build positive associations with unexpected noises too. A car hitting a drain cover. Something clattering outside. A door slamming. A sudden noise in the garden.

Rather than waiting until a dog is already struggling with noise, I want to notice these moments and think about what happens after the sound. I can pair that unexpected noise with something the dog already enjoys - food or a toy – capture it with your marker word that already has a strong reinforcement history. I can build on that further by moving into a familiar game we play together, adding movement, interaction and something I already know this particular dog finds exciting.

At other times I might deliberately have sounds quietly in the background while we're training, searching, playing, chewing or simply relaxing. There are lots of ways we can begin to build positive experiences around sound. It doesn't have to look like a formal noise training session.

We're not trying to teach a dog simply to put up with noises. We're creating experiences where sounds can become part of a picture that already contains things they enjoy. Of course, none of this is a promise that doing these things will prevent a dog ever becoming frightened of fireworks. Real fireworks are unpredictable and bring much more than sound alone. But we can think about the experiences we're giving our dogs before we ever get to that point.

Over the next few weeks, I'll show you some of the other ways I work with sounds. Adolescence is such an interesting developmental stage, and understanding some of the changes taking place can make a huge difference to how we support our dogs through it.

I explore adolescence and the changes our dogs may experience during this stage in much more detail in my Understanding Your Dog's Teenage Phase course.

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04/09/2026

Building trust around objects doesn't start when the dog already has something we want them to give up.

There's quite a bit of learning history behind what you're seeing in this video. Before introducing an object, I've already spent time building positive associations around my approach and my hands, particularly important with this dog because she has a history of resource guarding.

I've also separately built a very predictable pattern around the word ‘drop’:

‘Drop’ = hand goes to the treat bag = food arrives.

We've practised that pattern in different rooms, without asking her to give anything up. Now I'm beginning to bring those pieces together.

In this video I introduce a completely novel object and start taking that same predictable pattern into a new picture - one where she actually has something.

And it doesn't work perfectly first time. That's an important part of the learning too. Rather than assuming she should understand, repeating the cue or reaching for the object, I can change how I deliver the food and help her recognise the pattern in this new situation.

As we repeat it, you can see that picture starting to become more familiar.

For a dog with a history of resource guarding, I'm also thinking about more than the Drop itself. I'm continuing to build positive experiences around my proximity and the presence of my hands without them always predicting that something is about to be taken away.

Although this particular dog has a resource guarding history, I wouldn't wait for a problem before teaching these foundations. This is the same sort of learning I'd build with a young puppy — creating positive, predictable patterns around people, hands and valued objects from the beginning.

A reliable Drop is useful. But for me, the bigger picture is the trust and learning history we're building around it.

25/08/2026

In my last post, I talked about building trust around valued objects and showed some of the work I'd been doing with Tilly.

So where does a reliable 'drop' fit into that picture? For me, it starts long before I actually need the dog to let go of anything.

At this first stage, I'm simply creating a very predictable pattern:

Drop = my hand goes to the treat bag = food arrives.

That's it.

I'm not waiting for the dog to have something in their mouth. I'm not asking them to give anything up. And I'm certainly not saying 'drop' and then reaching in to take something away.

At this stage, the word itself is simply learning to predict something good.

With enough repetition, that prediction starts to matter. The dog hears 'drop' and begins to anticipate what comes next - and it's that change in expectation that we can later use when we begin introducing the cue around objects.

I think this early stage is easily overlooked because it doesn't look particularly impressive. Nothing is being dropped!

But we're building the emotional response and the predictable pattern first, before asking for the behaviour.

Next, I'll start taking that pattern into everyday life - using 'drop' when the dog happens to have something, rewarding them, and sometimes simply walking away and letting them keep it.

Because if 'drop' always predicts "you lose what you've got", we can very quickly change what that word means to the dog.

11/08/2026

Every behaviour has a learning history. Resource guarding is no different.

Dogs don't wake up one morning deciding to protect an object. Their feelings develop through experience, and understanding those experiences is often the first step towards changing behaviour.

As owners, we often remove things for all the right reasons – to keep our dogs safe, stop them chewing something dangerous or prevent them picking up something they shouldn't. But for some dogs, repeated experiences of losing valued items can gradually create anxiety around people approaching.

The important thing is not to feel guilty if you've done this. Most owners have. The important thing is recognising that those experiences shape how our dogs feel, and once we understand that, we can start creating new experiences that build trust instead.

Behaviour modification isn't about winning battles over objects. It's about building enough trust that those battles no longer need to happen.

One of the biggest shifts I see in behaviour work is when owners stop asking the question - "How do I stop my dog guarding?" and start asking, "Why does my dog feel the need to guard in the first place?" That's where real behaviour change begins.

Have you ever noticed your dog becoming uncomfortable when you approached something they valued? It might have been a food bowl, a favourite toy, a stolen sock, their bed, the sofa or even their crate. Those small changes in body language are often where the learning story begins.

I've linked my longer YouTube tutorial on teaching a positive, reliable "drop" cue in the first comment. When taught well, it's another valuable piece of building trust around the things our dogs value.

02/08/2026

Yesterday was a special day.

For those who have never seen Championship Obedience, here's our winning round.

It has been nearly nine years since I last competed at Championship level. After returning this year, and following two Reserve Challenge Certificates, Mexx won the Championship Bitch class at Hatchford Brook, qualifying us for Crufts 2027.

Coming back to Championship has reminded me just how different this level of competition is. The exercises are longer, the distances greater, the environments and travel more demanding, and the partnership between handler and dog has to be stronger than ever.

What I'm most proud of, though, isn't the qualification itself. It's watching Mexx walk into the ring happy, confident and genuinely enjoying her work.

Her journey has also been very different to any of my previous Championship dogs. Because of work commitments, we've competed far less than I have in the past, but we've quietly been building the foundations in training. I also chose to train her almost entirely using toy rewards rather than food, which challenged me to think even more carefully about the emotions I was creating during training.

It's easy to build excitement. It's much harder to build excitement without losing thought.

Dogs don't just learn what to do; they also learn how to feel about what they're doing. Those emotions become part of the exercise itself. For me, the challenge has always been to create a dog that is enthusiastic enough to love working, but calm enough to think, listen and make good decisions, even in a Championship ring.

Whether I'm training a family puppy or preparing a dog for Championship Obedience, my goal is exactly the same: to build a dog that understands the task, enjoys learning and loves working with me. The exercises may look very different, but the training principles never change.

Even at this level, dogs still make mistakes. When they do, I don't see that as something to correct through pressure. I see it as information. It tells me that I need to explain something more clearly, break the exercise down further, or help my dog feel more confident in that environment. Every mistake gives me feedback about my training and the direction I need to take.

I'm incredibly proud of Mexx, and very grateful to Darren Wallace for thinking so highly of her work. This win gives us our qualification for Crufts 2027, and hopefully we'll continue building towards our next goal of becoming an Obedience Champion. More importantly, we'll keep doing it in a way that means she walks into every ring feeling exactly as she did yesterday - happy, confident and enjoying her work.

29/07/2026

One of the things I love most about confidence building is that the benefits rarely stay confined to the exercise itself.

Years ago, I worked with a little Chihuahua whose owners contacted me because she barked at everything outside the house. Rather than immediately focusing on the barking, we spent our sessions building confidence through simple activities that encouraged her to investigate, think and experience success. We met just once a month, and her owners put the work in between sessions.
When we came to the final lesson, I said, "Right, let's go outside and start working on the barking."
They smiled and said, "She doesn't do it anymore.".

We had never trained the barking directly. What had changed was how she felt about the world around her.

When dogs become more confident, they're often better able to cope with situations that previously felt overwhelming. That doesn't mean confidence is the answer to every behaviour problem - there are many reasons dogs bark, lunge or react. However for some dogs, helping them feel more capable can have a surprisingly wide reaching effect.

It's one of the reasons I enjoy looking for opportunities throughout a dog's life to help them explore, investigate, solve little problems and experience success. Those moments don't have to be dramatic. Often it's the accumulation of lots of small successes that helps a dog approach the world with a little more confidence.

A Great Success.......One of the most rewarding parts of teaching isn't collecting rosettes - it's watching people and p...
19/07/2026

A Great Success.......One of the most rewarding parts of teaching isn't collecting rosettes - it's watching people and partnerships grow.

Today I'm incredibly proud of Sally Wheeler and Merlin.

Over the last few years, Sally has put an enormous amount of work into developing the precision, understanding and partnership needed to compete at the highest level of competitive obedience.

Like many competitors, there have been moments where her confidence has been tested. But she kept learning, kept training, kept putting that learning into practice and, most importantly, kept believing in the process.

Success at this level doesn't happen overnight. It's built through commitment, thoughtful training, attention to detail and a willingness to keep learning every step of the way.

Watching Sally's confidence grow alongside Merlin's training has been every bit as rewarding as seeing the results themselves.
A thoroughly deserved achievement.

Huge congratulations to you both. I'm incredibly proud of everything you've achieved together. ❤️

16/07/2026

One of the biggest mistakes we can make with puppies is becoming too quick to show them the answer.
If every problem is solved for them, they never get the opportunity to think, experiment and discover things for themselves. That doesn't mean leaving puppies to struggle.

It means creating learning opportunities that are simple enough for them to be successful. That's exactly what's happening here.

Today it looks like a puppy putting its nose in a bowl. But that's just the beginning.

As training progresses, this simple game develops into a really useful tool that can be used in many different ways throughout a dog's life. The exercise itself isn't the important part.
The emotional experience of learning is.

Every time a puppy successfully works something out for themselves, they build a little more confidence, a little more understanding, and a little more enthusiasm for learning.
One of my goals isn't simply to teach behaviours. It's to build a history of successful learning experiences.

Dogs that enjoy thinking.
Dogs that make good decisions.
Dogs that are confident enough to try.

And dogs that know it's always worth communicating with me if they need help.
For me, that's what good training is really about.

When you first watched the reel, what did you think the puppy was learning?

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40 Martins Lane
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RG129EN

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