In the county of Lancashire, Northwest England, small black and tan farm dogs has been used to drive cattle and help their owners catching rats for at least 150 years.

The breed uses a special technique while herding called "nip and duck" - which means nipping at the stocks heels and then ducking out, without injuring themselves or the animals they're driving.
The origin of the breed are unknown but a considerable number of people believe that the heeler was born after a Welsh corgi was introduced to a local Manchester terrier in the area of Ormskirk, Lancashire.

In the 1960's Gwen Mackintosh from Norfolk discovered and fell in love with the heeler, and started breeding them under the kennel name Acremead. Gwen Mackintosh was very keen to breed purebred dogs and kept a thorough record on pedigrees and lines.

In 1978 she started, along with a couple of other heeler enthusiasts, the Lancashire heeler club.
They wrote a breed standard and a registry begun.
In 1981 the British kennel club granted recognition of the Lancashire heeler as a rare breed,

Four years after, in 1985, the first two heelers were brought to Sweden by Gunilla Schulze Gustafsson.

The breeds popularity has never peaked but the population is growing steadily in several countries including Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands and USA.