In fairness Spot was a week known menace to everyone but Data. Although I suspect a Vulcan would probably have been fine. As for cats, I believe that even a targ would likely avoid picking a fight with a cat.
Worf grew up on the farming colony of Gault with the Rozhenko family. They later moved to Earth when he was a teenager, but he didn’t live there for too long before joining Starfleet.
Yeah, fair enough. But there were still a bunch of humans on that dirt-farming planet, right? I guess maybe they weren’t allowed to have cats, for some reason. But I dunno. I know what would happen in the United States right now, if someone tried to ban cats. It would get real ugly, real fast, for whoever tried to pull that shit.
So I still say, if Worf hung out with humans for any chunk of time, he should have seen cats. Or at least, like, a shitload of vintage cat memes and videos. Those would still be going around on all the Earth communications networks, for sure. It’s a huge part of human culture.
fwiw: the United States also doesn’t exist when Worf was growing up. that country (like many others) ceased to exist during/after WWIII.
anyway, that’s not to say Worf had never seen a cat, but that doesn’t mean he’d ever interacted with one or had any familiarity with them. I’ve known humans today who are completely clueless about them.
sure, but like i said, Worf didn’t really live on Earth that long, and there may not really be that many cats living off-world. Even still, since Klingons mostly see pets as food, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for Worf to have grown up getting too familiar with them, especially while struggling with his “warrior identity”.
Not to keep arguing, but he understood that pet targs were a thing. Although, now that I think about it, I don’t know if they eventually eat those, too.
Yeah, I guess so. I was wondering how long a pet targ might be kept, and now I recall that Martok said he’d had his old targ “since [he] was a boy,” up until the point when his wife was moving into his house, and deliberately let him wander out into the woods, or whatever.
So I guess the Klingons who do have pet targs are definitely keeping them as full pets, and not some weird halfway situation, where they’re a pet until they get fat enough to eat.
from what we see across all of Trek, pet ownership, in general, simply doesn’t seem as popular as it is today. perhaps it went out of fashion and is an eccentricity practiced by the few. perhaps it’s simply a biased reflection we experience due to the fact that we mostly only see space-born folx and toting around another living thing with you while trekking across the stars is a terrible inconvenience best avoided. that might explain why the only time we see people with pets, they’re almost always a senior staff member/officer with a long-term posting. or some civilian living in a house on a planet.
remember, Riker was first tasked with watching Spot for Data, and he couldn’t handle it at all- and he was 100% human who grew up on Earth. Geordi flat-out refused to even try looking after Spot.
You make some excellent points. I mean, who was the one person who instantly got along with Spot and had zero problems catsitting? Fuckin’ Barclay. Broccoli himself. The weirdest motherfucker in space.
I’m all for people being highly pedantic on a forum designed for that type of stuff but common guys, this was just shallow writing for a quick plot point or lazy comic relief.
Well, yeaaahh, but the point is having fun with all of the above. Doesn’t cost ya no latinum. In the words of an ancient pre-warp cultural documentary, “Don’t Be a Hater While Drinking Your Juice In the Hood”.
Wasn’t there a bit of backfilling lore that Earth’s feline population died as a side effect of an biological weapon released during the eugenics wars? They couldn’t bring back the genus because of the ban on genetic engineering. That’s why Worf didn’t know the word. …that would make Spot the rarest animal in the galaxy. Or he’s not a domestic cat at all…
Excellent point, but you’re a Lemming, you’re highly literate. Federation Standard might be his second language, I speak a decent amount of Spanish and I don’t know the Spanish word for “woolly mammoth”. 🐂
Hi there, slightly off topic, but speaking of translators, I recently saw the Discovery ep. where the translator is broken and I realized not everyone on the ship speaks Federation Standard. And now I can’t stop imagining Picard speaking French the whole time on TNG.
Or everyone using native regional accents instead of Received Pronunciation…it would be glorious chaos, worthy of a season closer/opener two parter…“Dorme vous…Data…dorme vous.”
Now I’m imagining that Scotty’s accent is the best the universal translator can manage to do with what’s actually a stream of incomprehensible Scottish gibberish.
Oh, I like that. That’s fully in my head-canon, now. Scotty is blasting out waves of full-on Scots lingo, and the computer is barely able to chew through it.
Well, this motherfucker DID switch sexes, turn into an iguana, and suspiciously look like four or five very different orange cats, over the years. So, ya know, you might be onto something.
i remember reading a reddit post several years back postulating that the most rational - and horrifying - explanation was that Spot was, in fact, several different cats in a series, all named “Spot”, representing Datas various failures in pet ownership, and that whenever we saw a “different” one, it was because the previous “Spot” had met some inglorious end off-screen.
Oh god. The first thing that came to mind was how many “feline supplement” variants Data had programmed into the replicator. The way they’re numbered implies that there were at least 221 of them.
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