This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

Tracy, you're a pet person.

Uh-huh. Many of our listeners are pet people we know because they send us pictures of their adorable animals. Uh, so if you step into any pet store today, you're kind of inundated with so

many clever products to make caring for your animals easier or to improve their well-being.

But this is actually a pretty new industry.

The idea of a pet store didn't really exist until the late 19th century,

and that was when Victorian England started to be more and more interested in keeping animals in the home

instead of as livestock or like an outdoor collection. And then from there, this idea of companionship

pets as sort of something to be acquired spread to the U.S. and the rest of the world. But even so,

those early shops were really about selling

the pets themselves with a few care products, like, that you would need to support that thing

to live. So the idea of a store filled to the brim with merchandise that's engineered expressly

for use with pets did not really happen until the mid-20th century. And perhaps the most well-known

story of an invention intended to help pet lovers and make their lives easier is kitty litter.

This one has some problems in modern thinking that we will talk about. But kitty litter,

it could be argued, was what kicked

off an entire new industry. So today we are going to talk about the origin of cat litter, as well as

other products that many of us probably have in our homes right now. And we're going to start by

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