Imagine if this cat-hater was alive today

It's 1921, and you're living in Bisbee, Arizona. You pick up your Sunday morning paper and find, above a giant photo of a domestic cat, the following headline: "Shall We Kill Every Cat In The US?"

While the appeal of cat videos certainly predates the Internet, the distillation of the nocturnal creatures into loveable, entertaining video stars is now enshrined in our culture, thanks in large part to video sharing sites like YouTube. What exists today is exactly what Rockwell Sayre had nightmares about during his very strange-seeming life.

Sayre passionately and publicly advocated for the complete and violent eradication of cats. He offered 10 cents to anyone in Chicago who would kill a cat and bring him the corpse, and rewards for those who killed large amounts of them. He wrote vicious poetry promising that those who killed enough cats could live forever.

When he died in 1930 - shot to death by his own son - Sayre left behind a 35-page will that "bequeaths the mildew and death damp" to anyone "who would keep a cat to kill mice when a dozen clean snap traps could be bought for a few cents."

Sayre's will also dictated that a box of candy be delivered to Mrs. Calvin Coolidge "who killed the White House cat for us to save Coolidge and the children from cat disease and save the mama song birds," according to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune.

But his piece printed in the Bisbee Daily Review - and, it seems likely, other papers across the country - is so extraordinary that it almost reads like a gruesome parody:

"Killing cats is the most popular movement ever started," he wrote, "and the jolliest. Everybody smiles and kills cats and then smiles. Smiles come first and smiles come last, and cats pass out between."

Sayre once said that he thought his rewards for the dead cats scheme killed 7,000,000 cats in Chicago. But as the above quote demonstrates quite well, he had a bit of a tendency to overstate things.

Sayre's anti-cat fever was placed in counterpoint to Mrs. George Kessler, the National Secretary of the American Cat Association. "Cats are the most gentle of creatures," she begins.

"Cats do not suck the breath from infants," she rebuts, "nor do they maraud the nesting places of birds as much as has been represented. The person who dislikes cats has something harsh in his nature. For cats are the essence of refinement."