An excerpt from Out-of-Doors in Carolina PBC dated 1942

Our Birds Vs. Our Cats.
     At the cost of losing some of my cat-loving friends I still must report that the informal but very well prepared talk given by Henry Magie of Winston-Salem, on “Our Birds vs. Our Cats” should give even the most devoted cat-lovers pause to meditation. The cat – he quotes Eleanor Booth’s book on “Cats” – reproduces at seven months, and if the “cat cemetery” doesn’t intervene, may keep on reproducing for ten years. There can be three litters yearly, ten in a litter not being an unusual average. The cat, as we have always heard, has the proverbial nine lives, may live to be 18 years of age, and is not subject even to senile decay.
     The cat is one of the important causes of hay fever or asthma, for the effluvium from a cat’s fur is a bad nose irritant. The cat is fast, strong, an accurate leaper, a skilled climber – and woe betide any bird or nestling which faces those tiger teeth and tiger claws! Your pet cat probably kills an average of 50 birds every year! (Eight million birds for the country as a whole, annually, has been given in statistical reports.) No other animal that has no economic value, has been so tolerated by man, says Mr. Magie.
     And the answer! Whisper in, but for one small but most successful sanctuary in a certain Carolina city, it has been a “Cat Cemetery,” and there, in an unobtrusive corner, are the graves of 12 cats – unbidden but persistent visitors to a bird sanctuary. (Which reminds me of the story Dr. Pearson tells in his “Adventures in Bird Protection,” about the bluebird house occupants he and his young bride had been watching. Three times the cat had got the females [the male always grieved disconsolately for a day or so, then turned up happily at the same nesting box with a new lady]. And then “something happened to that cat, and I buried it on a sunny slope at the back of the garden.”)
     Hardly a night or day goes by that we ourselves do not see some strange cat skulking about our grounds, around the garden, or close to the house and the feeding stations. I think our next project will be to pick out that “sunny slope” and begin to have a few cat graves. Carbon monoxide is a good, humane way to accomplish this, according to Mr. Magie.
     And speaking of humane treatment, the only time I have heard ire in the voice of our gracious and smiling president, Dr. Shaftesbury, was when he added a wrathful addendum to Mr. Magie’s talk about the so-called “humane “ people who are so soft-hearted they cannot painlessly do away with their own unwanted cats, but put them in bags and take them some miles out to the country to become wild strays and to prey on wildlife.