Most of us are convinced we could pick our own cat out of a lineup by voice alone. The deep, throaty yowl of a Siamese you grew up with. The clear, insistent chime of the cat you have now. It feels obvious that a meow is a signature. A new study published in Scientific Reports says we have been listening to the wrong sound.
It turns out the purr, not the meow, is the part of a cat that is truly one of a kind.
The experiment that flipped the script
Researchers from Germany’s Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Italy’s University of Naples Federico II started with a sensible hunch. Meows are aimed mostly at humans, so they figured meows would carry the strongest individual signal. They gathered 276 meows from 14 cats and 557 purrs from 21 cats, drawing from private homes and local shelters and including both purebreds and mixed breeds. Then they fed the recordings to an automated speech recognition system and asked the computer a simple question: can you tell which cat made each sound?
The result surprised everyone. The program matched meows to the right cat about 63 percent of the time. With purrs, accuracy jumped to nearly 85 percent. The sound we pay the least attention to turned out to be the most identifiable.
Why the meow is so slippery
The explanation comes down to who each sound is for.
Meows evolved alongside domestication, essentially as a tool for managing humans. And because cats use meows to get things from us, they tune them to context. A cat will meow louder at one person, softer at another, more insistent when hungry, sweeter when angling for a lap. That flexibility is great for communication, but it makes the meow a moving target. The same cat sounds like several different cats depending on the moment.
“A meow is a cat adjusting its message to the audience, which is exactly why it makes a poor ID,” says Sara Lim, a Pet Times writer who covers feline behavior. “The purr is the cat just being itself, with no one to perform for.”
There is a second, sharper piece of evidence for that idea, and it is the part of the study that got less attention. The team did not only compare purrs against meows in house cats. Drawing on the Animal Sound Archive at the Berlin Natural History Museum, they compared domestic cats against their wild relatives, and found that domestication specifically ramped up the variability of meowing. In other words, the meow did not just evolve toward humans, it evolved to be flexible, a sound built to be bent. That fits the picture perfectly: the more a signal is shaped to manipulate an audience, the less reliably it identifies the individual making it. The meow became a better tool by becoming a worse fingerprint.
The purr came first
The purr is older and steadier. Kittens begin purring before they can manage anything resembling human-directed “talk,” and purring shows up in the wild across species like cheetahs, lynxes, and bobcats. Because the purr predates any human influence, it never got reshaped to suit us. It stayed consistent, which is exactly why it works as identification.
The researchers found solid evidence that every cat in the study had its own distinct purr, an acoustic fingerprint. Purring tends to surface in relaxed moments, during petting or close contact with a trusted person, and it serves as one of the earliest channels of communication between a mother cat and her newborns.
The practical upshot
So picture the blindfold test, where you have to find your cat among many by sound. Skip the meows. A meow tells you what a cat wants, not necessarily which cat is doing the wanting. If you want to zero in on yours, listen for the purr, that low, cozy, unmistakable rumble that belongs to your cat and no other. The numbers back it up: software identified individual cats from their purrs about 85 percent of the time, and from their meows only about 63 percent.
References
- Schild, Anja, Danilo Russo, et al. “Meows Encode Less Individual Information Than Purrs and Show Greater Variability in Domestic Than in Wild Cats.” Scientific Reports, vol. 15, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-31536-7
- “Cats’ Purrs Reveal Who’s Who Better Than Their Meows.” Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, December 2025. https://www.research-in-germany.org/idw-news/en_US/2025/12/2025-12-10_Cats__purrs_reveal_who_s_who_better_than_their_meows.html
