You have to admit that you – yes you – have been to a fansite or two in your time. A fansite meaning, specifically, to be a website dedicated to a celebrity or popular topic of some kind (I.E.: a film series) made by an “average Joe” type of fan/admirer who is not affiliated with the subject itself in any formal way. When I was a youngster¹, celebrity websites of almost any kind were always official and endorsed by the celebrity and/or their management. Nowadays that is definitely not the case. There are fansites to anything and everything, and there are more often than not multiple ones for a single topic. When there are multiple fansites for a single thing, things can get pretty complicated.

One of the biggest “complexities” of the fansite world is the naming of these sites in regards to the celebrity or topic they are dedicated to. There seems to be a very specific algorithm used by fansite creators to determine just how their domains and site titles are chosen, and I have finally exposed it! Amazing! I shall now explain to you all the extremely difficult and tedious task of choosing a fansite name, but please: do not try this at home!

STEP 1: Make it sound official even though it’s not official.
We all know that if a website claims to be official and thus represent or be endorsed by someone but doesn’t have that credibility, that can result in some big trouble! Oh my, we do not want that. So to avoid any legal issues surrounding representation and/or affiliation, you can’t use the words “official”, “approved”, “endorsed”, “authorized”, “recognized”, or any of those other awesome words because that would be a big boo boo.

STEP 2: Register a .com, .net, or .org with [some form of] the topic’s name in it.
This one actually makes sense to me, though, because you obviously want a domain name that says what the site is about. Keep in mind that even when yahoo.com and google.com were new on the block people had no idea what they were when they saw/heard the name. Thus, if you name your site something that is not correlated to the topic of your site, you might hurt your traffic in the long run. The closer you can get to the actual name of the topic of your site, such as a celebrity’s working name (I.E.: britneyspears.com for Britney Spears), the better. If you need a dash in between the first and last names of a person, you may do that. You may also cut down the first name of a person to a single letter and leave the last name intact if that’s what it takes to get a relevant domain (I.E.: kstewart.com for Kristen Stewart) purchased. Hell, if you’ve got the funds, buy anything and everything you can that is related to the person’s name. It doesn’t really matter as long as it goes to the same place under the same crappy site title which is in step 3.

STEP 3: Use specific “keywords” in your site’s title to make it seem more important and useful than it really is.
There are a lot of words that are used over and over and over by fansites that used to seem really innovative, but because they are used over and over and over, they are definitely not. Oh well! Use them anyway so you can fit in! There are levels of superiority in the keywords, so chose wisely. If there were two fansites to a person/topic with the same title that would be some epic dramarama right there and hate mail or possible hacking would ensue. The highest and most desirable level of keywords consists of thing such as:

celebrity name + “fan”; “fans”; “online”; “network”; “source”; “web”; “daily”

If none of these are available because there are just too damn many fansites for the topic you are making another fansite about, make something up that is vague but overall positive, like “Supergirl” or “We love ____” or another unoriginal name/phrase. If you end up doing this, step 4 will definitely be more important to you!

STEP 4: Pad your site description and content with propagandistic and exaggerated words to infer your site is superior to all others around.
This is a rather crucial step for every fansite and not just those that didn’t get a great domain name or site title. If you want your fansite to seem like it is the cream of the crop regardless of the content you have on it, you have to advertise like it is! Using phrases like “non-stop” and “24/7″ make the site sound as though it is always ready to report news and the latest stuff visitors may want, even though fansite owners can’t be available non-stop, 24/7 to update their sites². Content should also speak to the visitor on a personal and individual level, so using identifying words like “you” and “your” to directly address the visitor at that moment is a good strategy. The last part of this step is to mix in various words representing quality and excellence throughout a fansite to reassure the visitor that your site is the best site to be at. The most commonplace words/phrases are “best”, “number 1″, “ultimate”, “definitive”, and “premier”³. Try to jam in as many of these as you can in as much space as you can find because invariably the next owner who makes a fansite to the same topic you have a fansite for will utilize this strategy. Thus, you might as well join the club and follow suit because if you don’t say your site is the best then what kind of fansite owner are you, anyway?

Voila! You now know the secret to success in the fansite world! Now that you have been briefed on the most tedious and painstaking steps of the fansite creation process, I highly encourage you to go out and make a fansite for something that already has a half a dozen fansites and see how well you do. Good luck!

On Friday, February 19th, 2010, it was released to the public that Daddy, a 16-year old male pit bull and number one sidekick of “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan, had passed away. I do not watch Cesar’s show very often, but who owned Daddy was completely irrelevant to me when I heard this news. The words that struck me so intensely and created such an emotional reaction in me were the ones that spoke of how Daddy – a member of a “bad breed” of dog – helped to prove to the public that pit bulls, and other canine breeds with bad reputations, are not born being aggressive and vicious. Daddy was quite the opposite which resulted in him being the perfect example of how even a feared breed of dog can easily be loving, dedicated, and calm.

In just the past 24 hours, I have heard so many uplifting stories from complete strangers across the world wide web about “bad breeds” of dogs; some people owned pit bulls, some owned rottweilers, some owned mixed breed dogs, and some didn’t own one at all. Regardless of the actual scenario, every person I have heard from has said the same thing: these notorious breeds of dogs can be just as loving and sweet as any other domesticated breed of dog out there. It is how a human treats and acknowledges the individual dog that can make them into violent and dangerous animals.

As a person who has grown up in a family that loves a dog of a notoriously “dangerous” breed, this all hit very close to home in every sense of the phrase. My family doesn’t own a pit bull, rottweiler, or other well-known domesticated breed of dog. We were instead blessed with the chance to adopt a wolfdog¹, or a wolf-dog hybrid (as the breed is called by the American Veterinary Medical Association). When we adopted our dog from the Arizona Human Society in 1996, it was illegal to own a wolfdog as a pet, and thus his original owners had lied about his breed to simply be able to have him in their home. Due to his behavior – which is extremely different than a domesticated dog – they gave him to the AZ Humane Society and we were able to adopt him. Since 1996, though, there has been a huge amount of positive progress in terms of public education and legislative changes in the state of Arizona concerning wolves and the wolfdog breeds. It is now legal to own a wolfdog – even without a permit – here in Arizona, and the overall image of the wolfdog has begun to rapidly change for the better.

While Arizona has seen leaps and bounds in the understanding of these beautiful animals, many other states in the USA have not. A large majority of the states in the USA completely prohibit wolfdogs, such as Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, and Illinois (just to name a few). What really disturbs me the most about the laws against owning wolfdogs is the actual worded phrases in the legislation that is made public. Connecticut, in particular, has some of the most poorly written legislation I have ever read concerning animal ownership (including wolfdogs):

“No person shall possess a potentially dangerous animal. Any such animal illegally possessed may be ordered seized and may be disposed of as determined by the Commissioner of Environmental Protection.”

The first sentence is really what reveals that the people who wrote the legislation have fallen victim to the myths about supposedly dangerous breeds of dogs. There is the potential for any dog to be dangerous. I have heard stories on the local news about dogs of the more popular and beloved breeds attacking people as they please here in my own state. There have been German Shepherd attacks on grown men all the way to Chihuahua attacks on small children. Whether a particular dog breed will viciously attack at random is not something that can be documented with 100% accuracy. This is simply because every dog will learn behaviors in a unique way based on their human owner. If the human owner does not properly enforce boundaries, give love and affection, or pay genuine respect to their dog(s), the dog can easily develop poor behavior because they have not been consistently taught otherwise. This is especially true for the so-called “bad breeds” of dogs, including wolfdogs. The term “poor behavior” does not mean “violent behavior” all the time, either. Violent and aggressive behavior in a dog is the result of reinforcement of it from a human. There are many police canine units in this country where dogs are trained to be “attack dogs” on command. Those dogs can do some serious damage to someone if they are sent to attack; in theory, that is a “potentially dangerous” animal. However, those canine attack dogs used by the police force have been trained to be aggressive only when permitted by their master. It is widely known that the attack dogs used by police units live with their master and his/her family, and thus have been called some of the best family pets to ever be placed into a home. Even though they do have the potential to be dangerous and hurt someone significantly, they do not exhibit that potential because they have learned how to behave around humans with a particular attitude, demeanor, and personality.

Training a dog is not just about teaching the dog how to “sit” or “stay” with a verbal command. In fact, the “more aggressive” dog breeds need more training in other somewhat abstract areas versus learning simple behaviors. This became extremely apparent to my family in regards to our wolfdog after we adopted him. Wolfdogs are more so at the very tip of the canine training spectrum, and thus the typical obedience classes and techniques do not usually work for developing good behavior in the breed. Many of the “bad breeds” of dogs have a specific need to decipher the ranking hierarchy of power in their family, human or canine. Our wolfdog is the lone dog in our family, but he knows the hierarchy of our “pack” and that he is not the “pack leader”. He treats each member of our hierarchy very differently based on where they stand in the “pack” and what their responsibilities are in the family. Regardless of our position, our dog always treats us with respect and acknowledges our individual roles in our family. Therefore, we show him the same respect and acknowledgment that he gives us. A dog such as a wolfdog or even a domestic pit bull will not tolerate disrespect and neglect. When those begin to occur, the potential for aggression and violence starts to form.

Cesar and Daddy were a clean, textbook example of how a “pack leader” should treat another “pack member” below them in the hierarchy. They respected each other completely, reacted to each other’s behaviors and emotions, and still showed affection at the same time. To be honest, this would have been the case regardless of the whether Daddy was a pit bull or not. All dogs need guidance and acknowledgment from a leader, whether their leader is their “master” or their “pack leader”. They are animals, and thus have an entirely different behavioral and thinking system than we humans do. You cannot treat a dog like a human because a dog cannot understand the rationale and logic behind certain behaviors that we – as people – may find obvious. Thus, we as humans cannot simply expect and assume our dogs will obey our every command and be perfect companions. Dog owners need to think like a dog because dogs do not have the ability to think like a human. We need to accommodate them, not the other way around.

Right now there are a huge amount of states in the USA that still have severe limitations on ownership of certain dog breeds besides the wolfdog. Outside of the USA, there are many provinces and territories in other nations that have harsh laws against particular breeds, too. If you are an animal lover or pet owner, please find out what your state/territory/province/etc says about dog ownership for particular breeds and what the consequences of illegal ownership are. I am sure a lot of you will be surprised to find that dogs that are owned illegally – regardless of their temperament or past behavior – can be “ordered seized” and “may be disposed of” as the laws of Connecticut so finely state. The human owners of these dogs may also be fined, lose home insurance coverage, or even be charged with a crime.

Is it really a crime punishable by law to love, respect, and acknowledge one of these dogs in our homes? Or is the perception of ignorant and misinformed humans that certain dogs are a public safety risk simply becoming more accepted than the truth behind a different species? If we say that “the dog is man’s best friend”, then why in the world is man becoming dog’s worst enemy? This needs to stop.