Bognor Regis dog owner chuffed as wheelchair bound canine earns citizenship award

Cody first lost the use of his back legs when he four and destroyed a disc in his lower back after stepping down a hidden rabbit hole.

Rapid treatment from a specialist vet wasn’t enough to repair the damage and Cody now gets around in a doggy wheelchair.

Despite the accident, owner Kim Brown is proud to report that Cody passed his gold Good Citizens Award on June 11 – a challenging Kennel Club certification which puts pampered pooches through their paces.

While the bronze award reflects ‘a basic standard that all adult dogs can achieve with correct handling,’ and the silver award involves more challenging tasks like greeting friends, vehicle control and road walking, the gold certificate is the most difficult of all.

To achieve it, dogs have to tackle newer, more difficult concepts like being sent to bed, relaxed isolation, heelwalking off the lead and an emergency stop, all of which illustrate a deeper degree of understanding and control.

For a while it seemed that the gold award was beyond Cody’s reach, given the limits of his disability. But Cody, stubborn as his namesake, was not to be denied.

"We started Cody on the awards before he had his accident,” Mrs Brown said. “He completed his bronze and silver awards, but then he had his accident and life just went completely pear-shaped.

"When he got settled, I started to realise that he had just embraced life, despite what happened to him. When I would took my other dog to kennel club classes, he would get visibly annoyed at me for not taking him, because he just loved it so much.

“So we decided to take him back and he just got on with it. Once he was back in training, I realised he could do it.”

For Mrs Brown, Cody's success isn't just a story of his own boisterous love of life, it’s also about the value of disabled dogs, of dogs who might go otherwise ignored.

“You don’t have to give up on a disabled dog – they can lead the same life as an able-bodied dog, and people forget about that. So long as they’re happy, they can have a fantastic quality of life.”

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