Why cats are crazy for catnip

The impact of recreational drugs is often seen as destructive, in terms of basic physical health, or behavior (e.g. addiction).

If catnip isn't destroying cats' lives, what's the harm?

Along the same lines, does it gives cats a “hangover” of sorts afterwards? The article describes catnip as similar to heroin for humans. I’ve never done heroin but I would imagine the withdrawal is really unpleasant which is what then causes addiction. Do cats experience the same come down? Can cats get addicted to catnip if they have access to an unlimited supply?

How dare you?! Won't someone think of the kitty cats?

i recently moved into a house with some other people. they have cats which they have owned for many years. after living here for a while, i was sitting on the couch watching star trek with these people when one of the cats came up and sat on my lap. they were shocked. that cat didnt sit on any of their laps, ever. and they became a little jealous. this happens literally every time i take up residence with people who own cats. their cats become very attached to me and the owners become jealous. one time, very very jealous.

most people are very blunt. they do not see past the surface of anything. they are impressed with superficial charm and not much else. they arent able to see inside a person, to figure out how their mind works or what it would be like to wear their shoes. they dont build models to explain the world and they arent interested in knowing how anything works. they dont listen when people speak. most people are stupid. and most of the time, this kind of talk is cast aside as being too vague and qualitative. but i have quantified it with cats.

when you consider a cat, the first impulse is to anthropomorphize. and since the cat cant speak, your assumptions about what it wants are guided by your anthropomorphism. most people only get this far and so most peoples relationship with their cats are really relationships with themselves. but some people pay close attention to what the cat is doing and how it responds to things, and carefully pack away that data instead of just writing it off as noise or "thats just what cats do." eventually you are able to demonstrate to the cat, through your actions, that you understand what it is feeling and what it wants. when a cat realizes that you are paying attention, that you are listening, it is a very different experience for the cat. the cat understands whats going on and will act in a way that is designed to communicate. and they will also trust and love you much, much more than anyone else because they know you are listening. thats the key, they are smart enough to know. most people assume they are dumb, and attribute their aloofness to it.

people get super jealous because they think they are showering their cats with love. and they try to fix it by loving them more, but it just makes it worse.

if a person has cats and has not unlocked this line of communication, in my experience they also havent deeply understood other humans or anything else. and i almost never meet people who have.

In general: if an animal is observed to purposefully do something in the wild, and that thing isn’t known to be harmful to the animal, then most people will consider that thing to be a valid “enrichment” activity — i.e. something that would be good to offer as an activity for animals of that species, in captivity, to engage in when they seem bored/understimulated.

I don’t know about cats with catnip specifically, but many wild animals are observed to purposefully seek out and consume rotten (i.e. fermented, alcoholic) fruit to get drunk/high. (We know that alcohol is harmful to animals, so we don’t tend to offer e.g. captive apes rotten fruit; but we also don’t really stop them from hoarding fruit to make it become rotten, and then eating it. It’s a natural thing that they do. Cats gonna scratch each-other up play-fighting. Apes gonna drink.)

But why do we have such a different mindset toward this?

I think one big difference is that the human social norms on the acceptable recreational activities for humans are mostly defined/circumscribed by what doctors think is okay (i.e. we take the lead of the medical establishment — if doctors are chill about something, there isn’t usually a social norm against it, while if doctors get upset, other people also get upset.) And doctors don’t like recreational drugs very much, because they usually think in a “harm reduction” mindset rather than a QALY mindset: they’d rather decrease “risk of a loss of capability to experience a satisfying life”, than increase “the area-under-the-curve of satisfying-life-years.”

Meanwhile, the human social norms on the acceptable recreational activities for animals are mostly defined/circumscribed by what zoologists think is okay. Zoologists are the people with voices and platforms to talk about animals, since engaging in animal conservation and study tends to directly correlate with seeking funding for that conservation and study, which is usually implemented through educational outreach activities (i.e. building zoos/aquariums/nature parks, giving tours in conservation areas, etc.) And zoologists, traditionally(?), mostly care about what they observe happening in nature. The whole field of zoology is built on observing animals in nature to figure out “what they do.” So our norms on animal recreation lean much more toward “natural ⇒ good” (regardless of harm potential) than “potentially harmful ⇒ bad” (regardless of naturalness.)

If veterinarians had the voices and platforms instead, I assume you’d see much more of a harm-reduction mindset in our social norms toward animal recreation.