Thirty-three percent (one in three) of domestic cats do not respond to catnip and therefore sixty-six percent do. Eighty percent of domestic cats respond to silver vine another cat stimulant. Fifty percent of domestic cats respond to valerian root and the same percentage of domestic cats respond to Tatarian honeysuckle.
Of the cats that do not respond to catnip, three quarters of them do, however, respond to silver vine and about thirty-three percent of these cats also respond to Tatarian honeysuckle.
Tigers respond disapprovingly to silver vine or are disinterested. A relatively small percentage of tigers respond to catnip by the way.
The chemical in catnip which causes the reaction in cats, nepetalactone, is only present at low levels in silver vine and Tatarian honeysuckle while catnip contains the highest concentration of this chemical. Of the other compounds tested in a study which I refer to below, silver vine contained the highest concentrations.
Study referred to: Responsiveness of cats (Felidae) to silver vine (Actinidia polygama), Tatarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica), valerian (Valeriana officinalis) and catnip (Nepeta cataria) by Sebastian Bol and colleagues.
Note: the title is a keyword which is why it has been used despite being grammatically incorrect – ‘percent’ should be ‘percentage’.
i have a question:
can cats build up a “tolerance” to catnip et al? i ask cuz 1 of my big kitties(4yrs old) reacts “normally”, ie he gets SUPER silly, but the other no longer does so much, which got me to wondering if they do build up a tolerance so to speak like humans do to some drugs. or am i just putting human thoughts/ideas on whatever is going on(like we do when we THINK our cat is looking angry, sad, etc when they r just chillin or staring at the spider crawling up the wall-chuckle!). so? what do U, & everyone else, think?