Silvervine reaches the most cats. In the one study that tested all four on the same animals, 79 of 100 cats responded to silvervine, 68% to catnip, 53% to Tatarian honeysuckle and 47% to valerian root. If your cat ignores catnip, silvervine is the one to try next.
Which plant reaches the most cats?
Bol and colleagues, writing in BMC Veterinary Research in 2017, offered all four plants to the same group of 100 domestic cats. That last part is what makes it worth citing. Most comparisons you will read stitch together separate studies with different cats, different material and different scoring, which is not really a comparison at all.
The order came out like this:
- Silvervine, 79%
- Catnip, 68%
- Tatarian honeysuckle, 53%
- Valerian root, 47%
Every one of them left a sizeable group of cats unmoved. There is no plant here that works on all cats, and any page telling you otherwise is selling something.
What if my cat ignores catnip?
Then this is the number that matters to you. Of the 31 cats that did not respond to catnip, 22 responded to silvervine. That is 71% of the catnip refusers.
Catnip response is inherited, and a real share of cats simply do not carry it. Those cats are not broken and they are not unusually serious. They have just been offered the wrong plant their whole lives.
Does my cat's age change the answer?
Less than you would think. The study found no evidence that younger age was associated with increased responsiveness. It did note a difference in intensity, with younger cats more often showing an intense rather than mild reaction to catnip, but that is a difference in degree rather than in whether they respond at all.
It did not set out to test very young kittens, so the widely repeated rule about kittens under six months is not something this research settles either way. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Why does almost every article only compare two of them?
Because catnip and silvervine are the two with something to sell. Honeysuckle and valerian rarely get a mention, despite reaching roughly half of all cats between them, which makes them a genuinely reasonable third and fourth thing to try.
If your cat has turned down both of the famous ones, you have not run out of options. You have run out of the options with marketing budgets.
What none of these plants do
None of them are a treatment. You will find pages attaching dental, digestive and calming claims to all four, and we are not going to repeat any of it. These are toys. What the research measured was behaviour: rubbing, rolling, holding, and then losing interest.
That is the honest scope of the whole category, and it is plenty.
The short version
- Silvervine reaches the most cats of the four, at 79%.
- Catnip is second at 68%, and its non-responders are the reason silvervine matters.
- Honeysuckle and valerian are the forgotten two, and still reach around half of cats.
- No plant works on every cat. A fifth of them shrug at the best performer.
Our Matatabi Ball is a pressed silvervine ball. matatabi is just the Japanese word for silvervine. If catnip has never worked in your house, start there.
Source: Bol S, Caspers J, Buckingham L, et al. Responsiveness of cats (Felidae) to silver vine (Actinidia polygama), Tatarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica), valerian (Valeriana officinalis) and catnip (Nepeta cataria). BMC Veterinary Research, 2017, 13:70. Open access.