Whence
Bengal cat
Animal

Where does Bengal cat come from?

The Bengal cat comes from the United States: the breeder Jean Mill developed it in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Its name comes from the scientific name of its wild ancestor, the Asian leopard cat.

A wild cat and a black tomcat

In 1963 Jean Mill, then living on her husband's ranch in Yuma, crossed a female Asian leopard cat with a black domestic tomcat: the first known deliberate cross of its kind, though Harrison Weir had written about such hybrids as early as 1889. Mill said she wanted to help the leopard cat, which was hunted for its fur. If people could buy a pet that looked like one, fewer wild cats would be killed and fewer kittens taken.

Built in California

Mill restarted her breeding in 1970, and in 1975 she moved to Covina Hills, California. That year Willard Centerwall gave her a group of hybrids bred in Loma Linda, California, for feline leukaemia research, since leopard cats seemed naturally immune to the disease. Mill crossed them with spotted house cats. In the 1980s she overcame the sterility of early hybrids and bred sweet-tempered cats five generations away from the wild ones. The International Cat Association accepted the Bengal as a new breed in 1986.

Why people think of India

The name sounds Indian because of the leopard cat's scientific name, Prionailurus bengalensis. Robert Kerr first named the species Felis bengalensis in 1792, from a leopard cat from Bengal, and the wild cat lives across South, Southeast and East Asia. One founding cat did come from India: in 1982 Mill was shown an orange spotted cat living in the rhinoceros pen of a zoo in India's capital, and he was shipped to her. But the breed itself was made in the United States.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Bengal cat ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Jean Mill ↗ · cfa.org ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Leopard cat ↗

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