Editing Himalayan cat (section)

==History==
{{See also|Persian cat}}

Work to formally establish a breed with combined Persian and Siamese traits, explicitly for the [[cat fancy]], began in the United States in the 1930s at [[Harvard University]], under the term '''Siamese&ndash;Persian''', and the results were published in the ''[[Journal of Heredity]]'' in 1936,<ref name="Keeler">{{cite journal |title=Siamese&ndash;Persian Cats |first1=Clyde E. |last1=Keeler |first2=Virginia |last2=Cobb |journal=Journal of Heredity |year=1936 |volume=27 |issue=9 |pages=339&ndash;340|publisher=American Genetic Association |doi=10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a104243 |issn=0022-1503}} First page is available online at http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/27/9/339/</ref> but were not adopted as a recognised breed by any major fancier groups at the time. Brian Sterling-Webb independently developed the cross-breed over a period of ten years in the UK, and in 1955 it was recognised there as the '''Longhaired Colourpoint''' by the [[Governing Council of the Cat Fancy]] (GCCF).<ref name="Berg">{{cite web |url=http://www.cfa.org/Breeds/BreedsKthruR/Persian/PERHIMArticle(1999).aspx |title=The Himalayan Persian |first=Linda |last=Berg |year=1999 |work=CFA.org |publisher=[[Cat Fanciers' Association]] (CFA) |location=Alliance, Ohio, US |access-date=4 March 2004 |archive-date=16 May 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130516195723/http://www.cfa.org/Breeds/BreedsKthruR/Persian/PERHIMArticle(1999).aspx |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Cat breeder [[Jean Mill]] from California, US, took a series of graduate classes in [[genetics]] at the [[University of California, Davis]]. By 1948, she was one of three breeders independently crossing the Persian and Siamese to create the Himalayan cat.<ref name="Hamilton">{{cite news |last1=Hamilton |first1=Denise |title=A Little Cat Feat: A Covina woman's efforts at cross-breeding wild and domestic felines are paying off handsomely. |url= https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-03-10-ga-32170-story.html |access-date=27 January 2019 |page=2 |work=[[Los Angeles Times]] |date=10 March 1994}}</ref>

Separate US-based breeding efforts had begun around 1950,<ref name="Berg" /> and a breeder known to sources simply as Mrs. Goforth received breed recognition from the [[Cat Fanciers' Association]] (CFA) near the end of 1957 for the '''Himalayan'''.<ref name="Berg" />  Early breeders were mostly interested in adding Siamese colouration to long-haired cats, and therefore reinforced the stock by outbreeding to Persians only to retain the Persian trait dominance.<ref name="Berg" />  However, by the 1960s, some were re-introducing Siamese stock and producing less "Persian-style" cats,<ref name="Berg" /> In the 1980s, a concerted effort to re-establish the breed along more formally Persian lines ultimately caused the breed to be merged into Persian as a variant in some registries (e.g. in 1984 by CFA), and a decline in the "old" or Siamese-like specimens.<ref name="Berg" />