How Cats Organise Their Social World

In this guide

The Felidae, the wider cat family, are solitary predators, and with the sole exception of lions, none live in socially structured groups. Even so, while the wildcat ancestors of the domestic cat were solitary animals, today's domestic cats show far more variable social behaviour, shaped largely by how densely cats are living and how much food is available. Our pet cat, Felis catus, has proved a remarkably adaptable species: while it retains its roots as a solitary hunter, in many situations, both natural and human-created, it will adapt to group living by developing its own social structures. Broadly, free-living domestic cats fall into two patterns: females forming small groups loosely resembling a lion pride, or cats remaining solitary with their own individual territories, closer to the pattern seen in most wild cat species.

Why territory matters

For a species built around solitary hunting, establishing a territory, in effect a hunting ground, matters enormously, and it needs to be defined clearly enough to minimise conflict with other cats, since avoiding unnecessary fights benefits the species as a whole. Cats mark out their territory using scent from facial glands, urine, faeces and anal glands. Combined with an extremely sensitive sense of smell, this scent-marking allows cats to communicate effectively while keeping direct confrontation to a minimum.

A cat's territory has a core area, or den, where it feels safe enough to sleep, eat, play and, potentially, socialise. Beyond this lies the wider area the cat will actively defend against intruders, and beyond that again lies the home or hunting range, the full extent of the ground the cat roams over.

In the wild, territories often overlap in neutral zones where cats can meet and interact. If a strange cat strays into another's territory, this usually provokes an aggressive response aimed at driving it off, starting with staring, hissing and growling and, if that fails, escalating to a short, noisy, violent clash.

Life in a colony

Feral cats, those living without human support, can and do form small colonies centred on a reliable food source, though this is not inevitable, and some feral cats live entirely alone. It is not unusual, though, for small groups of cooperating females and their kittens, known as matrilineal colonies, to develop. These groups may show a loose dominance hierarchy, but the relationships within them are complex rather than forming a strict interdependent hierarchy of the kind seen in dogs. Some cats form stronger bonds than others, influenced by factors such as relatedness, age and sex, yet cats never develop the kind of social survival strategy or pack mentality seen in dogs, and remain solitary hunters at heart. Cats, in other words, are not pack animals, though they clearly have the capacity to form social groups when circumstances favour it.

Where social groups do form, they tend to work best when the cats involved are familiar with one another and there is no competition over food or other resources. Strong bonds often develop between cats within the same litter, and between kittens and their mother. In feral colonies, kittens are sometimes nursed by more than one lactating female, which may itself help build social bonds early on; kittens will even attempt to suckle from females who are not lactating, which may serve a similar bonding function.

Colonies are often structured with a larger, central group of females clustered around the main food source, and smaller peripheral groups nearby that still have access to that food source but with poorer access, poorer health, and weaker reproductive success than the central group.

Male cats

Male cats rarely belong to these small colonies, tending instead to live on the periphery with large territories that can overlap several groups of females. Female territories are generally smaller and more clearly defined, though their size varies enormously depending largely on food availability and the local density of females; studies have found up to a thousandfold difference in home range size between locations, from as little as 0.27 hectares for a city-dwelling feral cat in Jerusalem to 170 hectares for a cat living in the Australian bush. Male territories may or may not overlap with each other, though overlap is generally more common among males than among female groups, and territory size tends to track the availability of food and the density of females nearby. Dominant males typically hold the largest territories, and on average a male's territory is around three times the size of a female group's, occasionally up to ten times as large. Interestingly, having numerous small, closely spaced groups of females tends to favour larger male territories overall.

Aggression

Aggression is uncommon within female colonies, since strong familiarity and relatedness between the females help keep tensions low. It is far more likely to appear as male kittens reach sexual maturity and are pushed out of the group, or between males and females as a tom patrols his territory. Toms rarely act aggressively towards females, though females who are not sexually receptive will often be aggressive towards males that get too close. That said, friendly interactions between females and toms do occur too, including mutual grooming and greeting behaviours such as raised tails, nose sniffing and head rubbing, particularly where the cats involved know each other well. Adult males, by contrast, tend to interact through avoidance, tolerance or outright conflict rather than friendly behaviour.

Because cats evolved largely as solitary hunters without much need for complex social signalling, they have comparatively limited ability to communicate visually compared with many social species. This means cats are less able to signal appeasement to one another, so when conflict does arise, the odds of it escalating into an actual fight are considerably higher than in more socially sophisticated animals.

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