Parker and Pooch - Dog Training & Solo Walks

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Parker and Pooch - Dog Training & Solo Walks

Hi, I’m Clare, founder of Parker & Pooch.

Bringing the joy back to walks for stressed and struggling dog owners with 1-2-1 dog training in Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Littleborough, Mytholmroyd, Bacup, Cliviger & Sowerby Bridge The lessons I learnt along the way while struggling with my own dog’s behaviour inspired me to ditch my career as an accountant and re-train as a dog trainer. And now I spend my days supporting others who were just like me, who want the best for their dog, and just need a bit of a helping hand to get there.

11/09/2026

I think it’s important to apologise when something goes wrong.

So with that in mind, I need to make a public apology for my dog’s behaviour this morning.

We were walking down Longfield road, Alice spotted Christian and Claire (of Baked fame) by their car outside the bakery, and sprinted towards them, full length of the lead.

It made me smile, cos often she’s a bit wary of people, but she always wants to say hello to them ❤️ She was making a beeline for Christian so he bent down as she approached at speed……..

And she ran straight past him. Proper drive-by blanking 🙈

I think she genuinely was running towards him, and then remembered at the last second that she wanted to go to Morrisons (for some reason she is obsessed with Morrisons car park 🤷‍♀️)

Funniest thing I’d seen for a long time 🤣🤣🤣

Sorry Christian, I would say she won’t do it again, but she probably will 🥰

08/09/2026

Today, at the grown up age of 46 and a quarter, I changed a tyre by myself for the first time ever 🤩

I had a flat tyre six months ago, and I rang Chris to come and change it for me cos I’m all for being a feminist but I had no flipping clue how to do it.

I had another flat tyre yesterday so I drove back home and had a go myself at putting on the spare, but I asked Chris to come out and watch what I was doing, so I didn’t end up with a ton of car on top of me and “Squashed by a car” carved on my gravestone. He also loosened two of the bolts for me when even me jumping up and down on the far end of the spanner thingy wouldn't budge them 🙈

Today I put the repaired one back on, all by my little self (and finished just before it started raining again 🥳) Strong Independent Woman status reinstated 💪

And you better believe I can crowbar this story back to dog training 🤣

Because this is exactly why my dog training comes in a multi-session programme, with calls in between, and as much support as you need via whatsapp throughout.

Because if you could just google “how do I stop my dog from barking at other dogs” or do whatever chatgpt told you to do, and all your problems will be solved … then 100% I would be out of a job.

But I’m not, and I don’t think I ever will be.

And here’s why.

Firstly because every dog is different, and rarely does generic training advice off the internet give you what you actually need.

And secondly, because while different people have different learning styles, everyone learns best in baby steps. By being taught something, and then having a go with some guidance, practising it, and then building up to doing it by yourself.

Step by step learning with support that works in a way that suits you - it’s the same whether it’s changing a tyre, or equipping yourself with the tools and insights to manage and work on your dog's behaviour, just like Conor and Louise did with Walter ❤️

Want to find out more? Send me a message and let’s get chatting 🥰 (And if you need a tyre changing, it turns out I can help with that too 🤣)

01/09/2026

I need to make a confession.

But first, a preamble.

I talked last week about safety zones and comfort zones being two different things. And how it's really important that our dogs feel safe, but at the same time if we don't sometimes gently push them out of their comfort zones, we won't make progress.

And of course, it's exactly the same for us humans 🥰

Because once we find ourselves living with a barky lungey growly dog, it's very natural to not want to put our dogs and ourselves in situations where the barky lungey growly s**t happens.

So our world gets a bit smaller. We don't take them to the park, we don't walk along the canal, we don't take them to busy cafes or pubs. We start to change the time we walk them at, maybe we get up at crazy o'clock in the morning or wait til late at night to miss the rest of the neighbourhood dogs out on their round-the-block walks.

And that's ok. That's more than ok, on a temporary basis.

In fact, quite often at the start of my training programmes, in our first session when we chat about everything and anything, I will often suggest walking your dog less, or at least changing the locations or the timing of your walks. Because while we're all conditioned to think that dogs must be walked X times a day for Y number of hours, nothing could be further from the truth - and for some dogs, any benefit of physical exercise and mental stimulation they might get from being walked are far outweighed by the negative impacts of stress and anxiety or frustration.

And it's also ok, more than ok, to realise that your dog is never going to be a social butterfly: that they're never going to enjoy a Saturday social at the dog park or a dog cafe, they're never going to enjoy a crowded beach on a sunny bank holiday weekend.

But there comes a point when you think you're doing the right thing for your dog by keeping their world small. But maybe you’re not anymore.

Cos the funny thing about comfort zones is that unless you stretch them every once in a while then they shrink. And your world that was already small, gets even smaller.

And that’s where the confession comes in.

Because it dawned on me a little while ago that I was firmly entrenched in my comfort zone, while successfully convincing myself that it was my safety zone and terrible things would happen if we left it.

Alice isn't a dog dog. And by that I mean she’s not very arsed about other dogs. At all. Even with dogs she's fine meeting, she usually has a very brief sniffy hello with, if that, and then carries on with her walk. Hi. Bye.

I came to realise that a long time ago - and while that made me sad, in a way it also made things much easier. We were never working towards some mythical future point where she was making tonnes of doggy friends and playing with them all. We just had to manage her world as best we could, so she didn’t end up in situations she wasn’t happy with; mostly around off-lead dogs getting in her face.

And so I got into the habit of always doing the same walks, and micromanaging her: moving her away from other dogs and always creating space for her.

Especially around where we live where she's generally more reactive (her “get-off-my-land” syndrome stretches far beyond the actual land that is hers/ours 🤣) And especially when I’ve got one of my work hoodies on and I feel like I should be a shining beacon of good dog ownership, whatever the hell that means.

So despite me telling my training clients that social interactions are important for the majority of dogs, even for the ones that aren’t overly social… she wasn’t really meeting any dogs at all, even for that quick sniffy hello.

I’d not been not practising what I was preaching 🙊

But now - I am. Lately I’ve been putting my big girl pants on: expanding our repertoire of walks, and letting her do her thing… stopping myself from stepping in and moving her away, not always creating that space for her. And just seeing what happens. With a heads up to the other owner if they’re close, that she might be a bit grumpy - so if that thing she chooses to do is a bit grumbly or barky, no-one minds too much.

And it turns out nothing terrible has happened… who knew 🤷‍♀️ Sure there’s been some grumpiness, but she’s also had some lovely little moments with a few different dogs 😍 And so I’m going to carry on pushing the edges of that comfort zone: not all the time, but more often than not.

So that’s my confession. And I'd love to know if you recognise yourself in any of this - either as someone who is currently hunkered down in their comfort zone and never coming out, or maybe someone that’s tentatively trying out those big girl pants for a change ❤️

25/08/2026

Let’s talk about resilience.

I took Willow (one of my walking doggos) up to the wind farm at the top of Bacup road last week.

She was doing great, trotting along, sniffing all the sniffs.

And then we got to a certain point and she suddenly clocked one of the massive white spinny whistly things in the sky.

She panicked and she spun (span? I never know which two of those is an actual word 🤷‍♀️) on the lead, her go-to move when she's overwhelmed. And so I held her harness for a little while so she didn't hurt herself, and talked to her gently, and gradually I could see the tension leaving her body.

And then she looked at the turbine again, and one of the things I love most about Willow is that her brain is transparent. Like actual transparent. You could see the cogs ticking, the recognition, and then another shift in her body language, a softening: ohhhhh, I've seen one of these before and it was ok.

I let go of her harness, and she stood for a second, and then turned back and faced the way we'd come from, back towards the car.

And we could have turned back then. I could have counted that as a win, that ability to recover from being spooked. That's resilience right there, in action.

But I could see from how she was holding herself that she was ok, she wasn't panicked anymore, she wasn't worried. She had just decided that back was probably the better option.

So I asked her, not with any tension on the lead, just with my words and my body movement - “shall we carry on instead?”

Knowing if she wasn't comfortable, she wouldn't follow. She would stand still, or maybe she would start walking back towards the car. And I would absolutely honour that communication, that decision she would have clearly made.

But - when I asked her, she chose to carry on. A little hesitant at first, and then she trotted past me, and continued up the track, towards the big scary white thing, that maybe wasn't as scary as she first thought.

And so we walked on, closer and closer to the turbine and then past it, and carried on with our walk. And on the way back we passed it again, still no bother at all 🥰
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from a stressful or scary event, the ability to keep going after encountering the unexpected.

It's an important skill for all dogs (and humans!), because there are always challenges to be faced in life.

And it's a particularly important skill for our reactive doggos. Because there are even more challenges to be faced in life when the everyday can be stressful or scary.

Being resilient doesn't mean that our dogs never get spooked again, or they never react to anything again. It means they can cope with what's thrown at them, and keep going.

We can help build resilience in lots of different ways. And one of those ways is helping our dogs face their fears.

It’s a fine line though. Between helping them face their fears, and putting them in situations that are too much for them. Between letting them grow, and setting them back.

And it can be hard to know the difference. To know which side of the line you're on.

Willow wasn't entirely comfortable. But she felt safe. And I knew that she knew I would listen to her, that I wouldn't force her into a situation where she didn't feel safe.

And that's the difference - for dogs and for us as humans: being pushed out of our comfort zone (a good thing) versus being pushed out of our safety zone (a bad thing).

If you're thinking that's great and all Clare, but how on earth do I know whether my dog is in their safety zone or their comfort zone…? Well that's exactly the sort of thing we get stuck into in my training programmes. So if you’d like to find out a bit more about that, drop me a message and let’s get chatting 🤩

PS: And I nearly forgot to say - well done Willow, you were flipping awesome 🥳💕

18/08/2026

, “There is no magic bullet is there”

A client said this to me once, years ago, when we were out on a training walk together. And it's always stuck with me.

Because there isn't in dog training.

(I mean ethical, welfare-led training… sure you can stick a shock collar - yes, here we are in 2026 and shock collars still aren't banned in England, crazy huh - on a dog and get some pretty fast results. I say pretty, the fall-out is not pretty. At all.)

That's not to say progress can't be made quickly. The amount of times that a client has reported back within maybe a week of our first session, that their dog is already calmer, more chilled, happier. And the only thing we've done so far is a simple switch or addition: a longer lead to give the dog more freedom on walks, window film to reduce the proportion of their day they're going nuts out the window at passersby, or maybe some treat scatters/searches to get their nose twitching and their brain ticking a bit more.

But that's exactly what my lovely client meant. We'd been working together a while at that point, and she'd seen such improvement in her dog's reactivity. Because of all the little things: the tweaks we'd made to her and her dog's day-to-day life, the skills we'd worked on that gave her more confidence out on walks, the techniques I shared that meant when 💩 did hit the fan she knew what best to do, as well as the training we'd done to work directly on the reactivity.

And so there is no magic bullet - there's just all the little things, that add up to a huge big thing: happier dogs and happier people ❤️

Want to find out a bit more about the little things, and what it's like working with me?

Book in for a call:
https://calendly.com/parkerandpooch/discovery-call

Or send me a message on 07866 404866
https://wa.me/447866404866

And let’s get chatting 🥰

13/08/2026

I think cancelled walks and re-scheduled training sessions may have left me with too much time on my hands 🤔🤷‍♀️🤣

11/08/2026

Breed matters.

Or does it 🤔

I came to the world of dogs through the door of rescue. I started volunteering at Dogs 4 Rescue as that's where Alice came from, and years later when we moved to Tod I helped out at PAWS while the site was still up on Eastwood.

And because of that background, I thought what breed a dog was didn't matter at all. In fact I would say I was quite anti-breed... what I mean by that is that I had a less than favourable opinion on people who spent thousands of pounds on a dog because they were a designer breed. Rescue was the best breed, and the mongrelly and mutty the better 🥰

And then when I got interested in training and behaviour, I started to realise breed mattered a lot.

[I also realised that the debate over breeding and rescue is a whole lot more nuanced than just "adopt don't shop" - but that's a whole different kettle of fish to be mulled over another day...]

Because as humans, we have bred different dog breeds to be great at specific things, but that also means by default we have accidentally bred them to be not-so-great at others. And so bringing a dog into your life and into your home solely on the basis of their looks - and not considering their likely behaviours and therefore their wants and needs - can often be a recipe for disaster.

So breed matters, a lot.

But. I still think you have to stop and look at the dog in front of you.

Because there are certain statements that are often said about certain breeds:

Collies need lots of physical exercise.
Huskies should never be off lead.
Spaniels need to be off lead.
Rommies are reactive.
Labradors are great family dogs.
Schnauzers are barky.

I could go on.

And don’t get me wrong, I've met and worked with many dogs that have read those memos. Read them, memorised them, and lived by them 100% 🤣

But I’ve also met dogs that disprove all of those statements.

So what am I trying to say ?

Breed is important. And breed isn't important.

Gosh that’s helpful Clare.

Ok, what I’m actually trying to say is this:

Take breed into account when you’re choosing which dog to bring into your life. And take breed into account about their needs and wants, so that they are living a happy and healthy life.

But also remember that breed isn’t everything. Look at the dog in front of you - because an individual dog is so much more than their breed ❤️

(and if you feel like you're letting your dog down cos of other people's opinions about what your dog should or shouldn't do... I can guarantee you that you're not 🥰, and I can also guarantee that you should stop listening to those people 🥰)

04/08/2026

This is an old review I'm sharing today, probably from three years ago. And the reason I'm still sharing it? Cos not much has changed.

Haha well lots has changed - if I hadn’t learned anything new as a dog trainer in the last three years I wouldn't be a very good dog trainer 🤣

I think I get even better results for people these days, and I probably give them less to do. There's probably a whole other facebook post in itself, but anyhow…

So maybe some things have changed - BUT - the ethos of what I do hasn't changed at all.

And this lovely review sums it up perfectly:

It's all about the dog for me 🥰 But it's also all about the people who share their life with that dog 🥰 Because it can't be one without the other ❤️

And I love the fact that the most common comment I hear at the end of working together is “I understand my dog better”

Because regardless of what people come to me wanting - whether it's just being able to walk down the street without their dog going nuts at every dog, person, and cat; or it's being able to sit in a cafe or pub with their dog chilling out under the table - the most important thing they end up with is a greater understanding and connection with their dog. And who doesn't want that 🤷‍♀️❤️

Want to find out more about what working with me is really like?

Send me a message on 07866 404866
https://wa.me/447866404866

or book straight in for a chat:
https://calendly.com/parkerandpooch/discovery-call

And let's get you started 🥰

28/07/2026

To the runner who was coming up behind us yesterday morning, and gave us a wide berth and ran down the middle of the road rather than past us on the pavement…

… thank you 🙏

It truly baffles me the amount of runners who head straight towards a dog without a care in the world, and then somehow seem surprised and/or angry when said dog lets them know that they’re not a fan of being charged at by another animal several times their size 🤷‍♀️

Even dogs who don’t struggle with people AT ALL can find runners intimidating. Never mind if the runner has a dog with them - it’s not fair on the dog that’s being ran towards, but it’s also not fair on the dog who is being encouraged to run towards the other dog… head-on meetings, especially at speed, can be confrontational and stressful for both dogs.

As a lapsed / ex-runner, when I used to run I would find any reason at all to stop: admire the view, have a drink, a brief natter with someone coming in the opposite direction, re-tie my shoelaces even if they didn’t need tying…. slowing down to a walk to make sure I don’t stress out a dog (and I don’t get lunged at or bitten by them) was just another good excuse for a breather 🤣

So unless you’re training for the actual Olympics - and quite frankly even if you are - for the love of god… if you see a dog when you’re out running: slow down and/or give them space 🥰

And PS: if you ignore my advice and you do happen to be running past us - Alice will be very judgey about your pace... 11-12 minute miles or slower (i.e. my sort of pace) she couldn’t care less, you’re not a threat, she doesn’t think of you as a runner (ouch). But anything faster and you WILL be in trouble - don’t say I didn’t warn you ❤️

24/07/2026

Trying to do a quick demo video for a client… good job I'm better at dog training than being on camera 🙈 What made me smile most about this when I watched it back was the floofy tail that didn't stop wagging the whole way through in anticipation of a treat 🥰🤣

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http://www.parkerandpooch.co.uk/

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