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Comment by cosmodisk | Hacker News Reader

Not just catnip,valerian too,which is a 'top recreational drug' for cats, apparently. When we were kids,we used to give small amounts of valerian root to our cat to chew. The cat would literally tear anything apart just to get it. Then,a few minutes later,it gets high, and just keeps rolling over purring with satisfaction.

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Olive wood too. Many cats will lick a piece of olive wood and seem to get some kind of high from it.

I've seen many cats lounging under (or on top of) olive trees in the Alps around Nice (France).

The cat I had growing up was OBSESSED with olives. He would eat one, then roll around in the spot where it was on the floor. It was the same reaction he had to catnip, but more extreme.

My current cat is much less interested in olives, but loves catnip.

Is this a specific olive specie?

I have an olive tree in my yard, about 10 cats who live in the yard and the street, and none of them ever seemed to care about the tree or the olives.

Try cutting and sanding a (too big for their mouth) piece of wood (it's a very hard wood), in my experience that's the most "potent" form of the drug. I used to keep a piece of wood, a bit larger than a domino, for my own cat and sanded it more or less regularly.

I don't know about olive species, but I know that not all cats have that weakness.

Our cats are definitely more into valerian than catnip, they dive face first into the stuff, eat it, roll around in it, etc. With catnip, no reaction.

Valerian is the cat drug in my home country. Mentioned it once to a friend, a Canadian, and brought him a bit the next time I went back home for a visit. His cat had no reaction. Zero. But the catnip worked as expected.

That's a little surprising, since Bol et al 2017 (https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-...), testing catnip/Valerian/silvervine/honeysuckle on ~100 cats, found that the response to each is correlated. (I get a tetrachoric correlation of 0.6 for catnip/valerian in my analysis: https://www.gwern.net/Catnip#optimal-catnip-alternative-sele... )

I think you probably just got unlucky there.

Possibly, but I do wonder if there's a difference between American and European cats as far as the drug response goes.

Oh, there definitely is a difference in probability of being a catnip responder: https://www.gwern.net/images/catnip/catnip-googlesurveys-cou... European countries appear less likely. However, that seems explainable simply by higher or lower genetic level of catnip response propensity. They are less likely to respond, but I would expect the correlation matrix to be the same. There's no particular reason to expect the fundamental biology to be different and thus that a cat in Europe is responding to catnip using a different biological pathway and so whatever overlap there is with the valerian response may be completely different and the correlation within-cat different.

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