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.