Jean Mill

Jean Mill (née Sones; May 14, 1926 – June 6, 2018) was an American cat breeder, owner of Millwood cattery. She is best known as the founder of the Bengal cat breed, and also made contributions to the Himalayan and the standardized version of the Egyptian Mau. Mill and her first husband, Robert Sugden, were involved in a precedent-setting case about the United States government's power to monitor short wave radio communications.

Breeding activities

Himalayan cat contributions

Jean Mill began work on the Himalayan cat in 1948, breeding Persian and Siamese cats together. She said she originated the breed by 1954 and was showing off her prizewinning cats by 1960. In 1956, as a genetics project at the University of California, Davis, with the intention of breeding "Panda Cats", she established what became the longest continuously bred line of Himalayan cats.

Foundation of the Bengal breed

Although other breeders were involved in developing the Bengal cat breed, most notably Pat Warren, William Engle, and Willard Centerwall, Mill is considered the originator of the breed because she created a domestic Bengal past the F4 generation by crossing the wild Asian leopard cat with a domestic cat, and then backcrossed the offspring through five generations. She then tirelessly promoted the breed.

Mill has said that the creation of the Bengal cat breed arose from her desire to save the Asian Leopard cat, which was under severe pressure from poaching. She named two rationales: if people could purchase a cat that looked like a wild leopard cat, the actual wild mothers would not be killed in the wild for fur; and the cubs would not be taken to be sold to customers.