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A new study by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the University of Naples Federico II shows: a domestic cat’s purr reveals far more about its individual identity than its meow. While meows are highly flexible and vary strongly depending on the situation, a cat’s purr remains stable and individually recognizable. Using automatic speech-recognition methods and drawing on the Animal Sound Archive at the Berlin Natural History Museum, the research team analyzed calls from domestic and wild cats and found that domestication has particularly increased the variability of meowing.
“People pay most attention to meowing because cats mainly use these vocalizations toward us,” explains the study’s first author, Danilo Russo. “But once we examined the acoustic structure closely, the even, rhythmic purr turned out to be the better cue for identifying individual cats.” The team – which also included bioacoustician Mirjam Knörnschild from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin – analyzed meows and purrs of domestic cats with methods originally developed for automatic speech recognition in humans and asked a simple question: How reliably can a computer assign each vocalization to the correct individual based solely on its sound? Both purrs and meows were individually distinctive—but purrs clearly came out on top.
“Every cat in our study had its own characteristic purr,” says co-author Anja Schild. “Purring often occurs in relaxed situations, such as during petting or close contact with a familiar person. It also is used for communication between the mother and her kittens shortly after birth. Meowing, on the other hand, is famous for its versatility.” Cats meow in a wide range of situations, especially when communicating with humans – when begging for food, seeking attention, or even “complaining.” This flexibility was reflected in the acoustic data: meows showed much greater within-individual variation.
To place the results in an evolutionary context, the researchers also compared the meows of five wild cat species – African wildcat, European wildcat, jungle cat, cheetah, and cougar – with those of domestic cats, drawing on the extensive collection of vocalizations in the Animal Sound Archive of the Museum für Naturkunde. The meows of domestic cats showed far greater variability than those of their wild relatives.
“Living with humans – who differ greatly in their routines, expectations, and responses – likely favored cats that could flexibly adjust their meows. Our results support the idea that meows have evolved into a highly adaptable tool for negotiating life in a human-dominated world,” says senior author Mirjam Knörnschild.
The study paints a nuanced picture of feline vocal communication and highlights how domestication has likely promoted vocal flexibility: purrs, stereotyped and low-frequency, serve as reliable identity cues that can help both cats and humans recognize familiar individuals in close social contexts. Meows, in contrast, prioritize flexibility over recognizability, allowing cats to express different needs and emotions to their human caregivers.
Russo D, Schild AB, Knörnschild M (2025) Meows encode less individual information than purrs and show greater variability in domestic than in wild cats. Scientific Reports, https://rdcu.be/eT01v
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