(Author unknown) Authorship and background[edit] Having been circulated and attributed sufficiently widely around the world, the original authorship of the poem is now uncertain. The website About.com suggests that there are three known contenders at present: Paul C. Dahm, a grief counselor in Oregon, US, said to have written the poem in 1981 and published it in a 1998 book of the same name (1981, ISBN 0-9663022-0-6). William N. Britton, author of Legend of Rainbow Bridge (1994, ISBN 0-9645018-0-5) Dr. Wallace Sife, head of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement, whose poem All Pets Go to Heaven appears on the association's website as well as in his book The Loss of a Pet.[2] However, the concept of a paradise where pets wait for their human owners appeared much earlier, in the little-known sequel to Beautiful Joe, the Margaret Marshall Saunders' book, Beautiful Joe's Paradise. In this green land, the animals do not simply await their owners, but also help each other learn and grow and recover from mistreatment they may have endured in life. But the animals come to this land, and continue to true heaven, not by a bridge but by balloon. The first mention of the "Rainbow Bridge" story on the internet is a post on the newsgroup rescue.pets.dogs, dated January 7, 1993, quoting the poem from a 1992 (or earlier) issue of "Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League Newsletter", which in turn is stated to have quoted it from the Akita Rescue Society of America.[3] Other posts from 1993 suggest it was already well established and being circulated on the Internet at that time, enough for the quotation of even a single line to be expected to be recognized by other newsgroup readers.[4]