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The Pet Rock

Maybe it’s true that you never know you love someone until you start complaining about them.  If that’s so, then Gary Dahl drew the wrong conclusion from his friends he heard complaining about their pets.  It was 1975, and not only had we put a man on the moon, we’d also invented the 8-track cassette.  So why couldn’t we invent a way to make walking, washing, feeding and grooming our pets easier?  Why couldn’t technology catch up? Dahl was no scientist or engineer, so there wasn’t much he could do to develop technology.  But he was in advertising, which requires a different kind of creativity.  Instead of innovative machines, advertisers’ skills run more toward a field of human endeavor that probably predates machines by millennia: getting people interested in something they neither want nor need.  But what could Gary do? The solution, he figured, was to create a better pet.  At least, to create a lower-maintenance pet for our busy, demanding, complicated lifestyles.  The solu