Is it true that cats don't really meow at each other, but rather at humans as a way to communicate?

Question

This is one of those little factoids that is tossed around a lot. Cats meow as a means to communicate with humans, and not really at each other. It's a fact passed around at parties or in pop sci articles like this or this, which actually quotes an animal behaviorist but not any recent peer-reviewed work. However, I can't seem to find scientific evidence of this.

The one paper I have been able to find that has been cited to support this claim is from 2011 (Yeon et al., 2011). The paper doesn't really focus on cats meowing at one another, but rather that feral and domestic cats use different acoustic parameters and emit calls at different rates when they growl, hiss, and meow at different stimuli. While their sample size is rather small, I think they make a good argument for this. However, they go on to say that feral cats meowed less than they growled or hissed in response to all stimuli, which supports the claim that cats don't meow at one another.

Here's the thing: the domestic cats in the study ALSO meowed less than they hissed or growled. In general, domestic cats were just less vocal and less scared than the feral ones. Additionally, this is where their small sample size really becomes an issue, where they had 25 feral cats and 13 house cats in the study.

In feral cats, 474 growls, 281 hisses, 37 meows and in house cats, 102 growls, 25 hisses, and 12 meows were analysed.

Fig. 2. Number of calls produced in 1 min by test situation for each group. aff is an affiliative or non-threatening stimulation. ago is an agonistic or threatening stimulation.

They go on to say:

In this study, the meow was exhibited in response to the approaching caretaker, stranger, doll, dog, and cat by feral cats, but meows were rare compared with other calls like growls and hisses. On the other hand, the house cat did not exhibit the meow except in response to the approach of a caretaker or stranger. Although the frequent of meow call was rare compared with other call types, this result in the house cat was similar to previous research results which were that meow was heard more frequently during cat-human interaction and very rarely heard during cat-cat interactions (Bradshaw and Cameron-beaumont, 2000, Brown, 1993).

I found it odd that the paper currently being cited to support that cats don't really meow at one another cited two other papers (listed below) to support their point. When I went to look them up, I found that the Bradshaw and Cameron-Beaumont paper isn't available online, and the Brown is an PhD dissertation on mostly the tactile actions of domesticated cat colonies, and olfactory communication. It only mentions meows in an appendix to define them as such:

MI MIAOW Cat makes a distinct miaow vocalisation when it appears to be trying to obtain something from another cat.

This seems to be the opposite of what the original factoid is claiming.

Does anyone have any insight on this? Any other papers that I missed that can help explain whether or not this 'common knowledge' is actually true?

References

Bradshaw, J., Cameron-beaumont, C., 2000. The signalling repertoire of the domes- tic cat and its undomesticated relatives. In: Turner, D.C., Bateson, P.P.G. (Eds.), The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 71–72

Brown, S.L., 1993. The social behaviour of neutered domestic cats. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Southhampton, United Kingdom

Yeon, S.C.; Kim, Y.K.; Park, S.J.; Lee, S.S.; Lee, S.Y.; Suh, E.H.; Houpt, K.A.; Chang, H.H.; Lee, H.C.; Yang, B.G.; et al. Differences between vocalization evoked by social stimuli in feral cats and house cats. Behav. Process. 2011, 87, 183–189.

Answer 1

It seems that Suzanne Schötz is not in your reading list - she has done enough work on domestic cat meows to merit an Ig Nobel Prize! From "Phonetic Variation in Cat–Human Communication" Schötz (2020):

"Although kittens mainly meow to get the attention or help from their mother, adult cats rarely meow towards other cats. Instead, meowing is one of the most common human-directed attention soliciting vocalisations. [...] Kittens often mew to solicit their mother’s attention, and adult cats may mew when they are in need of help. [...] Meows are often used in cat–human communication to get our attention, e.g. to solicit food or to negotiate a barrier (e.g. a closed door or window)."

This textbook chapter is not clear on the primary source for these assertions, but they seem to be generalised from a long-term research programme on domestic cat vocalisations.