Can Cats Eat Catnip? The ASPCA Lists It as Toxic
This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no doses here, no portion sizes, no feeding amounts and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your pet has eaten something you are worried about, or has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic and let them decide. Full disclaimer.
This is the one page in the food section where the sourced answer will genuinely surprise most readers, so it is worth leading with it plainly.
The ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center lists catnip, Nepeta cataria, in the toxic column of its plant database, and the species it names is cats.
What the ASPCA actually says
The entry gives the scientific name Nepeta cataria and the family Lamiaceae. Under toxic to, it names cats. Under clinical signs it says: “Many cats love catnip, but it can cause vomiting and diarrhea. It makes some cats sedated and others stimulated.” Source: ASPCA Animal Poison Control, Catnip (read 5 Aug 2026).
Read that carefully, because it is doing two things at once. It is classifying the plant as toxic in a database sense, and it is describing effects that are mild and self limiting in the same breath. Both are true and neither cancels the other.
Why a toxic listing is not the same as a poison
A plant database entry is a triage tool for a poison control centre. Its job is to tell somebody on the phone whether a plant is worth a call and what to expect. Vomiting and diarrhoea are worth knowing about, so the plant is listed.
That is a different question from whether a cat should ever have catnip, which the entry does not address, and which nobody we could reach has published on. The honest position is that the ASPCA classifies it as toxic, describes the effects as gastrointestinal and behavioural, and stops there.
We are not going to soften that listing into a reassurance, and we are not going to inflate it into a warning it does not make. It says what it says.
The behavioural response, and what is not published
The split response the ASPCA notes, sedation in some cats and stimulation in others, is familiar to anybody who has watched more than one cat meet catnip. What we could not source is a figure for how many cats respond at all, or anything about a heritable basis for the difference, from a publisher of the standard this site uses.
So the page carries the observation because the ASPCA makes it, and carries nothing about proportions because nobody we could read gave us one.
The fact that decides most cat food questions is not about the food. International Cat Care states that “cats are what’s known as obligate carnivores, meaning they are dependent on a meat diet and can’t thrive or survive without it”, and that “as obligate carnivores, cats are less able to digest and use carbohydrates”. MSD gives the biochemistry: cats require dietary taurine, cannot convert beta carotene to vitamin A because they lack the necessary intestinal enzyme, require arachidonic acid which “is absent in vegetable oils and fats but found in fat from meat, poultry, and eggs”, and “cannot synthesize substantial amounts of niacin from tryptophan” the way dogs can. Sources: International Cat Care, Feeding your cat or kitten (read 5 Aug 2026) and MSD Veterinary Manual, Nutritional Requirements of Small Animals (read 5 Aug 2026).
The honest summary
Catnip is listed as toxic to cats by the ASPCA, and the signs it names are vomiting, diarrhoea, sedation and stimulation. If your cat has had catnip and is vomiting, that is a described effect and it is also a reason to ring your vet rather than to wait and see, because this page cannot tell whether the catnip is the cause.
What we could not source for this page
Everything below was attempted on 5 August 2026 and is written here rather than left as a silent gap.
- International Cat Care publishes a page on cats and milk. The address returned 404 on both attempts, so the lactose claim everybody repeats is not sourced on this site.
- No publisher we could reach gives a lactose tolerance figure for adult cats.
- No publisher we could reach publishes a portion, a frequency or a maximum for any human food given to a cat, and neither do we.
- No publisher we could reach gives a proportion of cats that respond to catnip, or anything on the genetics of the response.
Where to go next
The parent reference for every food on this site is Can My Pet Eat It, which carries all 92 food and species pairs with the publisher and the date read. The species hub is can cats eat. If your cat has already eaten something, go to my cat ate something, the poison control directory and pet emergency.
