I forgot how dark humor was in the olden days.

Also, our attitudes about domestic animals has changed a lot, I still remember when housecats were thought of by most people as undesirable pets, or even neighborhood pests to shoot, so the fact that people thought there massive farms for slaughtering cats and using their intestines for tennis rackets didn’t bother anyone. (They have always used cow intestines.)

It may have been comic strips about cats like Garfield that made a lot of people change their perception of cats by humanizing them. The rise in popularity of cats has been dramatic, and now it’s spread to the rest of the world via the internet. Places that once ate cats now pamper them as family members. So at least some good has come from the internet.