When Helen Jürlau Arnold uploaded a video in 2007 of her pit bull playing with baby chicks, she didn’t expect it to amass millions of views or for thousands of people to subscribe to her YouTube account. She was simply sharing a cute video of her dog Sharky with her family in Estonia.

 

“YouTube popularity was very overwhelming since my English was pretty bad and I had started using YouTube just to share clips with my family,” Arnold says.

 

Arnold was born in Estonia and lived there on a farm full of chickens, pigs and cows for 19 years before moving to Texas in 1999, so it was only a matter of time before she had her own menagerie. Her little zoo began with a pot-bellied pig, but it wasn’t long before she had chickens, ducks, bunnies and the stars of her YouTube channel, Sharky the pit bull and Max-Arthur the snowshoe cat.

 

Max-Arthur was discovered on Arnold’s property 11 years ago, and Arnold says “he was in terrible condition and probably wouldn’t have lived till the next day” if they hadn’t taken him in. Sharky came along five years later as a four-week-old pit bull puppy, and he was one of the main reasons why Arnold continued to share videos of her pets.

 

“I had a hard time with the bad comments and people saying that my dog could not be trusted, so that was why I kept doing the updates like 'Pit bull and chicks - two months later',” she says.

 

While you might not expect a pit bull and a cat to get along, Arnold says that Max-Arthur and Sharky were instant friends — but Max is the boss, of course, which is evident in one of Arnold’s most popular videos, which features Max riding a Roomba vacuum and swiping at Sharky.