Answer: Although keeping two cats is often advocated so that they can keep each other company, especially if you are out most of the day, it would appear that because domestic cats do not form social groups they do not actually need the company of other cats. Especially, cats are loners and adopted to a solitary existence; this is true of all the members of the cat family with the exception of the lion and the cheetah. The only lasting relationship that occurs naturally between cats is that which is formed between a mother and her kittens, but even this doesn’t last beyond the time at which the kittens reach puberty, whereupon the group splits up and each individual goes its own way.
Consequently unless you want to have two cats it is not imperative for the cat’s sake to provide a companion. (Remember that where a new cat is introduced into a household the resident cat may feel initially that its established territory is being usurped and could respond with anger and frustration.) However, if two kittens are raised together they usually accept each other’s right to be present and these problems are unlikely to occur.
One advantage of having two cats can be that if they ever have to be left in a boarding cattery they will have a familiar companion with them. In Britain only about a quarter of all cats owners keep two or more cats.
When a numbers of cats are obliged to live together because they are all confined in the same breeding colony or household, they usually learn to tolerate each other and get along without too much trouble. In these groups there is often one cat (usually a male) who is dominate and demands to feed first and sit or slip wherever it choose. Sometimes, a second-in-command, can also be identified, and at times there may be one or two cats who are clearly social outcasts and have to feed after all the rest and occupy the last desirable sleeping places. But otherwise there is not the same rigid hierarchical structure for cats as seen in the social species, such as dog, where the ‘rank’ of each individual is well established.
If they can, cats generally prefer to avoid each other and therefore avoid trouble. To this end, scent marking of territory may serve to warn other cats that they might encounter the ‘occurring’ cat therefore to be cautions. Because of the absence of a hierarchy of dominance, chance encounters between cats, especially males, often end the fights because neither recognizes his own position as being inferior.
Notwithstanding this, is known that at nightfall both male and female cats of a neighborhood will often meet on neutral ground, that is to say, away from their own territories. The purpose of such meeting is uncertain but they are not related to mating or to asserting dominance. The cats just sit around, usually about six feet (2m) or more apart, through sometimes they will sit close together and groom each other. Such gathering may go on all night, particularly just before the start of the breeding season, through in general they will break up by midnight or soon after.
