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1. Happy Pit Bull started as a small, free personal website where I wrote about my experiences with my dogs and provided very basic information on dog care and training, acquired through my own personal experimentations and discoveries.
2. When I bought the Happy Pit Bull domain, I revised the site both in terms of layout and content. It focused more on factual information about pit bulls, dog care, and dog behavior. By now, I had done much more extensive research on dogs and pit bulls, and I was also involved in hands-on dog training and handling. The website was an “owner’s manual” type of site.
3. In early 2007, I decided that an “owner’s manual” just wasn’t sufficient to cover the important kinds of information that pit bull owners need and want. Subsequently, I revised the site to allow for a new orientation toward social issues and discussions that lie outside the realm of mere dog care.
4. In early 2009, I discovered the flexibility and inexpensiveness of blogging platforms and decided to move the site to WordPress.

Happy Pit Bull is not a 501(c)3 organization, but it is essentially “not-for-profit.” I would like to thank all the site visitors who have donated to me via Paypal or by purchasing a product through a link on this site; you are the reason why this site continues to exist.

Site History

Way back in 1999, I started a little personal website on the free Geocities site. At first, I wrote about a variety of animal caretaking tips that I couldn’t find elsewhere online. I hoped that my personal experiences with various types of pets would help other people avoid the novice mistakes and confusion I had when I started out.

In fact, my page on Pekin duck care in a suburban setting helped quite a few people, and I answered several email queries about duck-appropriate housing and winter weather care despite being a novice myself (albeit a novice who had already figured out all this stuff).

Then I got a dog (Felanie), started studying dog care and getting involved in dog training. Owning a dog turned out to be complicated, interesting, and time-consuming. I was determined to “do it right” for the sake of my pit bull, but soon found that that was much easier said than done. Resources on pit bull ownership were scarce, and what little information I could find left me with more questions because it did some or all of the following: conflicted with other information; provided little more than anecdotal evidence to support some theory; used over-emotional or sensationalistic language; generalized to the point of stereotype; or promoted activities and “care” that I was not at all comfortable with.

And nothing really prepared me for the stigma. Or the politics.

So my little personal webpage at Geocities was soon full of pit bull-related information. And one day, the host sent me a polite email: Your site is generating too much traffic. Start paying for your server space. It was a blessing and a curse in one. My site was popular, but I was going to have to start paying for the popularity.

I left Geocities, bought my own domain name and found a cheap host, and started Pitbulls.Jentown.com. It didn’t last long before I decided that since I was already paying for a domain name, I might as well buy one that suited my site! I bought Happy Pit Bull, overhauled the website to match its new domain name, and settled in.