111–120 of 123 posts
Maybe this is a weird question, but why do people give drugs to their cats? Is it to see them have fun? Is it so the owners have fun? Is it good for them? I never quite understood why catnip was so socially acceptable when we view other drugs with such different eyes.
How were they able to patent this? I've known for 20 years that catnip works as a mosquito repellent; there was a 2001 paper that showed that its essential oil, nepetalactone, was 10 times more effective than DEET[1]. Soon after this a variety of "natural mosquito repellent" products based on catnip appeared on the market. I've made homemade repellent myself by soaking catnip in alcohol and it works great, although i…
Here's the patent. The claims are a little more specific than I think you're imagining - that's typical for making something like this patentable. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7524888B2
>sesquiterpenoid mixture, wherein the sesquiterpenoid mixture is an elmol/hedycaryol mixture having a purity of 55% or more (..plus any possible carrier)
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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.
I've considered growing actinidia kolomikta , a species of kiwi berry vine, which is noted on wikipedia as being highly attractive to cats. The article mentions Actinidia polygama so I wonder if it's just the entire genus
So an insect repellent that cats, big or small are going to be attracted to? I mean, I don't think I'd want to put that insect repellent in the savannah, north america or a place that has lots of feral cats.
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> People smoke weed all the time > and it decreases violence https://i.imgur.com/61JXtJ7.png
I mean, have you ever heard of someone high on THC acting belligerent? I sure haven't. Alcohol, meth, cocaine, bath salts, everything else, absolutely. Ask a cop how often he gets called for a DV issue because someone is drunk. But weed? Nah. People on weed just want to eat pretzels and watch cartoons.
Maybe this is a weird question, but why do people give drugs to their cats? Is it to see them have fun? Is it so the owners have fun? Is it good for them? I never quite understood why catnip was so socially acceptable when we view other drugs with such different eyes.
Yes, it is to see them have fun. The cats definitely appear to enjoy it. My cat has learned to recognize the sound of me opening the tub of catnip and will come running across the house to get some. Good for them? Maybe. It's certainly not bad for them. This has been very much studied. Cats can't overdose on catnip. At worst, after 5-15 minutes of sniffing and rolling around in it, they stop responding to it. > when…
To be fair, tobacco isn’t the drug, it’s nicotine, and nicotine does not cause cancer. (But I’m sure you knew that.)
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Speaking to an Australian friend, I learned that 25% of cats don't respond to catnip at all - or cat mint, as they call it. Apparently the branch of the cat family in Australia are ones that don't have the catnip genes, so she had never witnessed a cat acting crazy in the characteristic cat way. My previous cats did two different things - one would instantly flop down and roll in the catnip, then lazily lick it off h…
I've compiled all of the reported catnip studies and run some large-scale surveys of my own: https://www.gwern.net/Catnip https://www.gwern.net/Catnip-survey Globally, catnip immunity rates are closer to a third, but Australia is at the extreme with about half cats not responding. Villani 2011 https://www.gwern.net/docs/catnip/2011-villani.pdf establishes that catnip response is highly heritable but polygenic ( not M…
p.s. This is the ultimate thread-killer. Had this been posted at the very top of the thread, most of the comments and speculations posted would be irrelevant. Can @dang please pin this to the top? ;)
My cats get high after eating tiny bits of green olives. They roll, are crazy for more, will literally lick my clothes if I spilled a drop of the pickle, and one of the gets a bit playfully aggressive. Just the smell of olives attracts them like crazy. Have also tried catnip, but no observable effect. I don't overdo it, I don't have olives very often in the fridge, and even then they maybe get a tiny piece once a wee…
I'm curious: what was the situtation when they first ate olives?
My cats get high after eating tiny bits of green olives. They roll, are crazy for more, will literally lick my clothes if I spilled a drop of the pickle, and one of the gets a bit playfully aggressive. Just the smell of olives attracts them like crazy. Have also tried catnip, but no observable effect. I don't overdo it, I don't have olives very often in the fridge, and even then they maybe get a tiny piece once a wee…
Cats are known to like fatty and salty foods, and not have a "sweet tooth". Olives are oily, and preserved in salt
