Catnip Immunity and Alternatives | Hacker News Reader

Catnip Immunity and Alternatives

gwern.net

78 pointsbenbreen22 comments

One of my cats only responds to it when not being watched. If you give her catnip then she will pretend that it is not interesting until I leave the room. If I peek in 30 seconds later then she is rolling around with it acting crazy, but the moment she notices that I can see her she immediately stops and resumes pretending that it has no effect.

That's consistent with Villani 2011's ( https://www.gwern.net/docs/catnip/2011-villani.pdf ) finding of considerable measurement error in catnip response: you have to try a cat multiple times to be sure if they are a responder. This, I suspect, may be an issue with a number of catnip studies, since researchers administering catnip may be strangers or not be on good terms with the subject cat, and definitely none of them mention trying to control or correct for this (or any awareness of this beyond Villani).

My suggestion is that the response is not totally uncontrollable and so anxiety/uncertainty/stress can 'shut down' the response, kind of like the socially-dependent response to many drugs in humans, like alcohol or MDMA - boozing with your friends at a cheery party with no inhibitions is very different from meeting a stranger & maintaining your vigilance.

A dinner guest once brought a sprig of catnip covered with flower buds freshly picked from her garden, knowing we had cats.

I don't have the words to describe what happened. We'd given the cats dried catnip before, but this was an entirely different situation.

If you want to give your cats catnip, fresh stuff is definitely worth getting.

We’re they more than a little aggressive to get it from her?

No, it just had a very potent effect once we placed it on the floor near them. Particularly on the male who was the larger, dominant cat of the house. There were two mature siblings from the same litter, a large male and petite female.

They were both excited as usual at first, but then the male became very aggressive. Ferociously, with all his claws out, he hunkered low straddling the sprig, digging all claws deep into the carpet while systematically ripping every bud from the sprig using his mouth, and eating them.

The female ran to the furthest bedroom and hid.

He foamed from the mouth, and became somewhat feral for the next ~20 minutes. Not towards the people, just kind of on display to nobody in particular. It was fascinating to watch.

My older cat loved catnip. If you had an herbal tea with catnip in it, he'd search our home and track you down to investigate. He'd roll around in it if you gave him enough.

He loved it, right up until we got a kitten. Both male, in case that's important, but after we got the younger one neither of them ever seems to react to catnip at all.

My cat acts a bit strange and erratic in my kitchen, the strangest of which is insisting (via clawing the door and meowing) that I open up a pantry door where it will look inside and then leave, only to continue the behaviour soon after.

I've heard certain cleaning products can mimic cat pheromones (not sure how true that is, though), or at the very least affect the cats sense of smell which would affect a cat more than a human. My cat seems uninterested in cat nip.

>I've heard certain cleaning products can mimic cat pheromones (not sure how true that is, though), or at the very least affect the cats sense of smell which would affect a cat more than a human.

Not all cats, but I did had more than one that liked a lot the smell of bleach (NOT sniffing from pure bleach but if you wash something with bleach and then wash your hands without soap it remains a little on your hands), my cats went mad, sniffing my hands, self-striking against them, etc.

I came home once to my cats attacking a bag of catnip that they somehow pulled from a cabinet and managed to claw through the foil package and the outer ziplock it was in. What’s weird is they just like to eat it.

Today I heard Dennis McKenna on a podcast describe wild cats of south america exhibiting catnip-like-induced behavior after munching wild Banisteriopsis caapi, the MOAI-containing vine used in ayahuasca ceremonies.

My cat is one of those attracted to olives. He is always attracted by salads and other foods with olive oil, but it's olive fruits that drive him crazy.

Wow I’ve never heard of that before now. About the funniest I’ve had is a cat who loved spicy pork rinds. He chased me down from 30’ away once.

This is a pretty impressive study on something seemingly so mundane.

That's gwern's specialty. I highly recommend browsing around his site if you haven't before. It's the only thing on the internet that reminds me of a 17th century book in terms of structure (and eccentricity!).

I have not read enough 17th century books to know what you mean. Can you expand on that?

The main things that come to mind are:

- Encyclopedic scope but enormous attention to detail;

- eclectic and exploratory approach to organization;

- highly individualized prose style;

- significant amount of authorial distance, almost mystery (is the name a pseudonym? where do they live? why are they so interested in catnip anyway? etc);

- no fixed point of completion, everything is constantly being revised;

- subscription-based fundraising model (Patreon is far from new in that regard).

Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is probably the best example I can think of that illustrates what I like about books from that period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Melancholy

Montaigne's Essays and the works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish are excellent too though, if you're interested.

Yep, I remember I enjoyed the https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin article very much.

i only found out about silvervine this week. our cat is immune to catnip but silvervine worked well, worth a shot if yours is the same.

[OFF-TOPIC] Katniss. <3

(From the Hunger Games books and movies: "Catnip" is how Gale used to call Katniss Everdeen. May the Odds be Ever in your Favour.)

While comments like this can be interesting, they are probably more suited to reddit than hacker news.

Well immunity to a sexual stimulant, that's the base for a third sex, a caste not participating in the egoistic battle for a self replicating future. A caste allowing for the creation of crowds without large constant infights, a crowd where the young may hide from fraternicide.. What seems like evolutionary dysfunction indirectly creates the ability for society, for a group dynamic that allows for complex stable states. And even though it's risky, it may give the whole species a benefit.

It's not clear that catnip's nepetalactone has anything to do with sexual functions (that's not very solid speculation by researchers, and less well founded than for, say, valerian); it doesn't seem to correlate with gender or neuter status; even if it did, it doesn't exist in the wild in order to affect cat populations in the first place (catnip grows wild in only a tiny fraction of domestic cat or the original wildcat ranges and varies dramatically across _Felidae_ anyway); and even if it did affect sex in the wild, wildcats are not particularly social creatures in the first place and the rare 'cat colony' is largely a human creation; and even if it did affect cat colony, 'group selection' like that of species requires unusual and very delicate conditions, otherwise it just collapses into individual selection on 'selfish genes'.

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