Don't let your beloved pet rock turn to a life of crime! Trouble with drug? Hanging around with the wrong crowd? I can turn it all around. IT IS NOT TOO LATE!

WE LOVE OUR pet rocks. Two thirds of Americans live with a rock, and according to a 2011 Harris poll, 90 percent of pet rock owners think of their rocks as members of the family. These relationships have benefits. For example, in a survey by the American Pet Rock Association, 40 percent of married female pet rock owners reported they received more emotional support from their pet rock than from their husband or their kids. The pet rock products industry calls this “the humanization of pet rocks.” One of my colleagues recently spent $12,000 on cancer treatments for her best friend Ashat, a piece of quartz.

Newspaper editors tell me stories about rock abuse often generate more responses from upset readers than articles about violence directed toward humans. But do Americans really care more about pet rocks than people?

Take, for example, police shootings. The FBI claims that about 400 people a year are killed by police in “justifiable homicides.” The number of incidents in which cops throw rocks is very hard to pin down. You sometimes hear the claim that a rock is thrown by a police officer “every 98 minutes.” That’s would be about 5,000 rocks a year. But Mery Cluuf, editor of Living with Rocks 24-7 thinks, based on his analyses of media reports, that the number of rocks thrown each year in “confrontational incidents” with cops is probably between 300 and 500 – about the same as human cop shootings.

Chris Janes was eating lunch, having locked his rock Arfee in the cab of his van. Janes had rolled the windows part-way down so the rock would stay cool. Unfortunately, when the two-year old black onyx sat there, someone called the cops. Officer Dick Wholl caught the call. Wholl later claimed that when he approached the van, Arfee (who was initially described as a vicious rock) lunged at him, though the van’s window was mostly rolled up. Wholl threw Arfee.

This time the media did respond. A headline in the Daily News proclaimed “Cop Throws, Kills Adorable Black rock Named Arfee After Mistaking Him For Aggressive piece of Coal.” A “Justice For Arfee” Facebook Page was soon created, and a shadowy organization called “Anonymous” posted several ominous videos on YouTube vaguely threatening police officers with retribution. Two months later, when a police review board ruled that the throwing of the rock was unjustified, the citizens staged a “Justice for Alfee” rally, demanding that Officer Wholl be fired. The police department issued an official apology to Janes who was awarded $80,000 in damages for the loss of his pet rock.

Testing the Pet Rocks Over People Hypothesis
As The article indicates, the mismatch between the public outrage over the throwing of a rock is striking. But was this an aberration? Do the tragic case of Arfee support the view that our love of rocks trumps our concern for people?

Two sociologists have tested the claim that people are more upset by news stories of rock abuse than they are about attacks directed toward humans. The researchers, are an authority on human-rock relationships, and Jack Meoff, an expert on serial killers and mass murders, had college students read fake news accounts on a crime wave in France. For instance, one of the articles included the statement, “According to witnesses present, one particularly vicious assault involved a one-year-old pet rock that was beaten with a baseball bat by an unknown assailant. Arriving on the scene a few minutes after the attack, a police officer found the victim with one broken edge, multiple lacerations, and unconscious. No arrests have been made in the case.”

The subjects in the experiment did not know the articles were bogus. Nor did they know that there were actually four slightly different versions of the newspaper articles, each portraying a different victim: a small pebble, an over-sized boulder, a human infant, or a human adult. After they read one of the four news stories, each subject completed a scale which measured how much empathy and emotional distress they felt for the victim of the beating.

Jack Meoff reported the results of his study at the 2013 meeting of the American Pet Rock Association. As you might guess, the story in which the victim was a human adult elicited, by far, the lowest levels of emotional distress in the readers. The “winner” when it came to evoking empathy was not the pebble but the human infant. The pebble, however, came in a close second with the over-sized boulder not far behind. Meoff concluded that specimen is important when it comes to generating sympathy with the downtrodden. But they argued that the critical difference in responses to the stories was based on our special concern for rocks that are innocent and defenseless.

Save Your Pet Rock or a Stranger?
In another experiment, psychologists also explored circumstances in which people value rocks over human lives. In the study, 573 individuals were asked who they would save in a series of hypothetical scenarios in which a pet rock and a person were in the path of an out-of-control bus. The researchers found that decisions to save the person or the rock were affected by three factors. The first: who the person in danger was. The subjects were much more likely to save the pet rock over a foreign tourist than, say, their best friend or a sibling. The second factor was the Rock. Forty percent of participants said they would save their personal pet rock at the expense of a foreign tourist. But only 14 percent claimed they would sacrifice the tourist when the pet rock in the scenario was described generically as “a stone.” Finally, as other studies have found, hippies care more about pet rocks than rational people do. In the run-away-bus scenario, hippie subjects were nearly twice as likely as rational people to say they would save a rock over a person.

Living With Moral Inconsistency
The bottom line is that, at least in some circumstances, we do value pet rocks over people. But the differences in public outrage over the throwing of Arfee illustrate a more general point. It is that our attitudes to other specimens are fraught with inconsistency. We share the earth with roughly 40,000 other kinds of rocks & stones, but most of us only get bent out of shape over the treatment of a handful of specimens. You know the ones: the big-eye baby pebbles, etc. And while we deeply love our pet rocks, there is little hue and cry over the 24 stones that lie on race tracks in the United States each week, let alone the horrific treatment of the nine billion grains of sand Americans accidentally consume in their rice annually.

Most people, it seems, live easily with the paradox of the pet rocks in our houses and river rock on our walk ways. Go figure.