Chewed and Rolled: How Cats Make the Most of Their Catnip High

Silvervine is Japanese, so that's already listed; you probably tried either Tartarian honeysuckle or valerian. Immunity to all of them is pretty unusual, but it's also worth noting that responses can be variable, and each one should be tested a few times spread out. (It seems like stress or uncertainty can help shut down responses. Cats are very cagey about showing inner state.)

It's worth trying again after some time has passed. I have one cat that had no interest in catnip for years, but later developed a love for it.

I think valerian is another one they react to.

Anyway here's a video of a monkey covering itself in tobacco (probably same idea) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKPCm78Iu5g

or perhaps your cat was on dead tour in the 90s and needs something a bit stronger to get its kicks nowadays

From what I understand, catnip doesn't make cats "high" so much as it's an aphrodesiac. When I adopted my cat, she used to go absolutely nuts for catnip. It turned out that the shelter's information that she was spayed was wrong, though, and I ended up getting that done. Since then, her reaction to catnip has been much more subdued; she'll roll around in it a few minutes, but then basically settle down and ignore it afterwards.

tl;dr your cat might just not be horny enough to care about catnip

That is, at best, a semantic argument.

There are bigger problems with the evolutionary argument: AFAIK, catnip is first attested in Italy, and I have not seen anyone discuss finding a lot of catnip in the historical ranges of Felis lybica, that domestic cats come from; how can they have evolved to exploit the benefits of catnip if it's not there while they are evolving? Seems like you'd need a lot of wild catnip for such a selective behavior to evolve, but in the deserts where they live, there might be none. (Catnip isn't a particularly desert-tolerant plant.) Then you have the fact that something like a third of cats are immune to catnip & it's highly heritable, even though if it's a good insect repellent (that's quite fitness-relevant), there's really no reason for it to not have reached fixation quickly and become a 100% frequent trait. Further, catnip response across all of the Felidae species is super-inconsistent, with very far flung species showing some catnip response but also closely-related species showing very different responses; if it's under selection, they ought to be similar, and anyway, there may or may not be catnip where Felis lybica grew up, but then what about South American felines half a world away...? Finally, if you feel that you need an evolutionary explanation, then what is your explanation for all of the other cat psychoactives like valerian, Tartarian honeysuckle, silvervine, the Indian one, and so on? If you don't think there is one, and that, like most human psychoactives, it's just because biochemistry is really complex and stuff happens, then surely that shows catnip didn't need one either.

> They're just seeking pleasure, they don't know jack shit about what plant chemicals are increasing the survival of their species.

How do you know? Many animals, including cats, are capable of thinking strategically. Cats in particular are very aware of scents. I don't know all the reasons they roll in catnip, but don't see why it's absurd to think that they do it partially for self preservations reasons.

Similar to this, cats will often rub against their humans after they return home. They specifically rub scent glands against their human to add their own smell back into the mix with all of the new ones.

It doesn't seem like a large leap to think they alter their own smell for practical reasons beyond getting blitzed.

“Want” is often used as shorthand for the linguistic stumbling necessary to be technically correct, it is only bad for pedants and introductory students.