Make a little noise for Bella!
A cat in the United Kingdom has earned the Guinness World Record for having the loudest purr of any living domestic cat.
“If there’s food around, or cuddles, she always purrs,” Bella’s owner, Nicole Spink, said in a news release from Guinness.
The 14-year-old feline’s purr was measured at 54.59 decibels, which Guinness described as similar to the sound of a kettle boiling.
Listen for yourself in the video below. Bella’s rumbling purr can really be heard clearly starting at about 1:29.
Spink said in the video that she and her husband often have to turn the sound on the TV up so they can hear it over the cat’s thunderous purring.
Purring is usually associated with contentment and relaxation. But cats sometimes also purr when feeling stress, which experts believe is a self-soothing mechanism. Anecdotally, veterinarians have also observed cats lying next to injured companions and purring, in a phenomenon dubbed “purr therapy,” according to Wired.
While Bella won the record for the loudest purr of any living domestic cat, the record for the loudest purr by a domestic cat ever is still held by two other felines, Smokey and Merlin, whose purrs clocked in at 67.8. Smokey set the record in 2011, and Merlin matched it four years later.