4 ms·
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 ca
by eps 6y ago
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.
- gwern 6y agoThat's a little surprising, since Bol et al 2017 (https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-017-0987-6 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-selection-solving-the-mdp https://www.gwern.net/Catnip#optimal-catnip-alternative-sele... ) I think you probably just got unlucky there.
- eps 6y agoPossibly, but I do wonder if there's a difference between American and European cats as far as the drug response goes.
- gwern 6y agoOh, there definitely is a difference in probability of being a catnip responder: https://www.gwern.net/images/catnip/catnip-googlesurveys-countryforest.png 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.