The dog who could only be patted with a foot, and never minded

Doges Editorial · 2026-05-26 · 5 min read

Judith Geppert is an Olympic torchbearer, disability rights activist, and wheelchair user who has spent a lifetime navigating other people's assumptions. Her rescue dog Teddy never had any. This is their story.

The night the pain kept Judith from sleeping, Teddy got up from his bed and crossed the room. He put his head on her pillow. A gentle lick on the chin. Then he settled beside her and stayed.

He was an Irish Wolfhound cross — large, shaggy, the kind of dog who takes up a meaningful amount of any room he enters. He was also, in those long nights, exactly what Judith Geppert needed. "To have him by my side when I was having an especially bad night," she told ABC News Australia, published May 24, 2026, "I knew I had to get through it for him."

A dog chosen from a website

In 2016, Judith found a dog named Rusty on the RSPCA NSW website. He was listed as an Irish Wolfhound cross, located further from Sydney than she could easily travel. Steve Coleman, CEO of RSPCA NSW, who had worked with Judith to find and match her with previous rescue dogs, arranged to have Rusty brought down to her.

Judith has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. She had navigated the logistics of dog ownership before and knew that some things would need to be adapted. Still, choosing a dog she'd never met, from a photograph on a website, was new. "I didn't know what to expect before meeting him," she said. "I was excited, but apprehensive about how he would act toward me."

She loved him the moment she saw him. She changed his name from Rusty to Teddy — because, she explained, he looked exactly like a big teddy bear.

A difficult beginning

Teddy was scared of the wheelchair. He refused to come near. For weeks, he watched from across the room, uncertain and distant. Judith, who had done many hard things across many years, waited him out.

Teddy underwent training that allowed him to live as a companion dog at the care facility where Judith lived. He learned her routine with a precision that still stands out in her memory — the support workers who arrived at specific times, the rhythm of each day. "He got to know who was coming and at what time, so he too would be waiting for them," she said. Over a couple of months, the wheelchair became ordinary. The distance closed.

Working it out together

Some things were never going to work the way they do for other dog owners. Judith couldn't hold treats. She couldn't give conventional cuddles. Patting, in the usual way, wasn't possible. What they developed instead was entirely their own.

Between us we worked out that I could cuddle and pat him with my left foot.

— Judith Geppert

Teddy had apparently been abused before coming to Judith. When she first tried to put her foot on him gently, he flinched and backed into the corner. It took time. Eventually, he understood what that touch meant — and he'd settle beside her foot and lean into it, accepting a language that belonged entirely to the two of them.

For treats, Judith used her voice. A soft, careful conversation. Teddy would always respond — a lick, a lean, a look. "If anybody wanted to touch him, he would look at me as if asking for my permission to go to them," she said. He had learned, with the thoroughness that rescue dogs sometimes achieve, the exact shape of who she was.

What other people couldn't offer

Judith's life included an impressive record: Olympic torchbearer, Duke of Edinburgh Award winner, disability rights campaigner. She had done things that many people haven't. She had also spent decades navigating the moment when someone looked at her wheelchair and recalibrated their expectations — usually downward.

"I have done many things in my life, only to be dismissed by people and society as being unable to function without a carer," she said.

Teddy never judged me. He just accepted me as I was. He didn't look at me any differently.

— Judith Geppert

This is one of the things dogs genuinely cannot do: register social status, credential, or physical difference in the way human observers almost always do. They respond to scent, to posture, to the texture of your breathing when you are anxious versus calm. For someone who has spent a lifetime navigating judgment, that absence is not a small thing. Many people describe it as relief — a specific, physiological relief, not a metaphor.

The company of chronic pain

Toward the end, Teddy had chronic pain too. He required monthly veterinary visits for pain-killing injections. The two of them moved through their days with a parallel understanding of what it meant to keep going when the body was being difficult.

"I think these challenges, coupled with our companionship bond, brought us even closer together," Judith said. There were nights when she couldn't sleep and he would cross the room to lie beside her. There were other nights when his discomfort was visible and she would talk to him quietly, the same way she had once talked him through his fear of a wheelchair, years earlier.

"I knew I had to get through it for him." The specific gift of a dependent animal — that you are needed, that your presence matters concretely to another living creature — is documented in research on recovery, chronic illness, and loneliness. It is not metaphorical. It is a reason to be there in the morning.

After Teddy

When the pain became too much, Judith made the decision she describes as one of the hardest of her life. She gave Teddy, in her words, peace.

"Losing him was one of the hardest things to happen to me. I miss him every day. I felt so lonely and he left a void in my life." She has another dog now.

What Teddy did — over eight years of mornings, of foot-pats and voice-treats and 3 a.m. head-on-pillow — was notice someone who had often been unseen. He learned the exact texture of her life and shaped his around it. That was the whole job. He was, in Judith's accounting, exceptionally good at it. To be loved exactly as you are by something that has no reason to pretend — there isn't a word larger than that.