Nobody knows who first recorded this particular miauw, and that is part of its charm — it circulates like most pet audio, shared until the source is lost. Long meows became a staple of meme culture because they parody human melodrama, a cat performing heartbreak over an empty food bowl. Short meow clips filled early Vine and YouTube compilations, and the stretched-out versions thrived on TikTok, where the extra seconds let editors time a zoom or caption to the wail. It endures because it is instantly readable: cute, funny and faintly pathetic all at once.