widening toprule et al. in booktabs

Question

I have two tables side by side. I want to trick readers into seeing this as one table, by widening the toprule command.

In the MWE below I want to join the toprule of the cats table to the dogs table, and the same for the bottom rule and mid rules.

This is a sneaky way of entering table data by order of column, rather than by rows.

The MWE is

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}[t]{l}\toprule
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tabular}[t]{l}\toprule
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 1

This is very simple to achieve ... just ad % between tables to prevent space between them:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}[t]{l}\toprule
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\
cat\\\bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
\begin{tabular}[t]{l}\toprule
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\
dog\\\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 2

You can simply wrap the tabulars inside a tabular. For example:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{@{}c@{}c@{}}\toprule
  \begin{tabular}[t]{l}
    cat\\
    cat\\
    cat\\
    cat\\
    cat\\
    cat\\
  \end{tabular}
  &
  \begin{tabular}[t]{l}
    dog\\
    dog\\
    dog\\
    dog\\
    dog\\
    dog\\
  \end{tabular}\\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{document}