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Offering helpful advice and an online meeting place, the site caters for the new generation of pet owners who, thanks to advances in veterinary care and societal attitudes, are increasingly sharing their lives with animals that would, in the past, have been put down.

Pictures on the site catalogue the success stories: the rabbit - now known as Wheelybun - who has adapted to life in a specially-fitted wheelchair, the asthmatic cat benefiting from newly-available feline inhalers, and the dog who went on to be a show champion after surviving a major injury.

Behind this burgeoning e-community lies Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill, a woman with seven cats, two collies, a deaf chihuahua, and a burning conviction that disabled animals have as much right to life as their non-disabled counterparts.

"I work with disabled people as my day job - I'm a consultant with people with learning disabilities - and it's pretty plain to me that you don't put people down if they're different, but try to make adjustments for their problems," she says. "So we started trying to do the same for animals, and trying to raise the profile of this as an option.

"For example, paralysis happens to a lot of larger dogs, particularly German shepherds - they get degeneration of the spinal cord - and for a long time vets just put them down. But now they can get wheelchairs with padding to make sure the limbs are comfortable, and as long as you can teach the dog to use it, they can still move around. There are even hydrotherapy pools for dogs and physiotherapists who specialise in caring for animals."

Pioneering centres, such as the in Cambridge, now boast MRI scanners for animals up to the size of a horse, while veterinary surgeons can refer pets to ophthalmologists, geneticists and cancer specialists.

One of the functions of The Disabled Animals' Club website is to provide lists of these new services and treatments as they become available, so that owners are informed enough to push for referrals.

While Conboy-Hill herself found that she had no trouble getting her pets' insurers to pay for five years of insulin injections for her late cat, money can be an issue for some DAC members. Some insurance companies are better than others, but there's no such thing as Disability Living Allowance if you're a hamster (although one elderly disabled woman did manage to get Remploy to make a dogmobile for her pooch on the basis that she was entitled to a vehicle herself).

Luckily, as a former nurse, Conboy-Hill is able to give stressed-out pet-lovers some basic advice. For instance, if your cat goes blind, try using different types of floor surface in different rooms, and avoid moving the furniture around, in order to help it orientate itself; if your dog loses its hearing, try summoning it with a torch instead of a whistle, or stamping on the floor to get its attention. Members also share tips on things such as using sign language to train their cat or dog, or finding bulldog-sized nappies.

But, like any experienced disability rights campaigner, Conboy-Hill is aware that attitude is everything. And by profiling the success stories, she hopes to raise awareness that life for a disabled pet can be a good one.

"From time to time, I still see people who have never come across these ideas, and I'll say: 'Look at this site - you'll see pictures of cats and dogs leading happy lives in wheelchairs - then come back to me'. It's not about over-sentimentality, or holding on against all the odds, or preserving beyond reasonable quality of life. It's about acknowledging that, with some adjustment, the animal won't really notice it's got a disability."

One of the biggest feathers in the DAC's cap was the day Conboy-Hill discovered that the royals shared their sympathies. "I found out that the Queen Mother had a corgi in a cart, so I wrote to her. She replied saying 'how nice'. Another one of our members who had an animal in a cart met the Queen. It's the Princess Diana effect - when you have high profile people who accept these adaptations, people start to think it's not that bad."

Things have certainly moved a long way since, just five years ago, a DAC member was pursued by the RSPCA for animal cruelty, after neighbours reported her for using a cat cart. She was told that if she did not put her pet down within three days, she would be prosecuted - until Conboy-Hill contacted the organisation, demanding to know what their disability policy was.

But helping owners come to terms with the idea of their pet being disabled often proves a bigger hurdle than any of the external issues, largely because pet owners have a tendency to regard their animals as people and imagine how they would feel in their situation.

"When cataracts form, people's first thought is: 'the dog's going blind, how awful - if that happened to me, I wouldn't be able to watch TV'. But the dog doesn't think that, and it doesn't think 'there's something wrong with me'. It just thinks the world is going away. And so it adjusts.

"I have to get people to stand back and realise that this animal has no concept of disability, that it isn't thinking: 'I can't go out in this cart, people will look at me!' Otherwise they tend to immediately fall into that catastrophic 'oh no, how are we going to cope?' mentality."

And unlike their human counterparts, animals don't have to cope with the prejudices of their fellow creatures; Conboy-Hill insists that, bar a bit of confusion over a tail that doesn't wag, they tend to respond to each other in the same way, disabled or not.

"A rat has no concept of disability," she says. "Other rats don't look at them and go: 'Ew, it's only got three legs!' If it functions then it functions; it's not going to know that it's got any sort of oddity about it."