Pets roaming the halls

When Spot turns up pregnant by one of 12 male cats aboard Enterprise, that suggests that cats and other creatures roam the ship at will, or that Spot went to at least one kitty playdate.

Aside from the whole "animals shouldn't be enslaved by people" thing, wouldn't that cause lots of problems for the running of the ship? You can give people warnings about their own behavior, but pets couldn't be held responsible for their own conduct. You could warn the owners of the pets about keeping their animals under guard, of course.

Is there some kind of force field that restricts pet animals' access to places people crew can go?

 

Doesn't work on cats.
That's just science.

 

It was a missed opportunity to have Spot's babies be cat/targ hybrids, or cat and something else.

Imagine Data arguing with some other crew member over paternity of Spot's babies.

 

The pregnant cat Data had wasn't Spot. Spot was male.

 

Or is Spot a chimera? You'd think Bev would have found that out, I guess, if it was true.

 

Or Data just named all his cats Spot, regardless of breed or gender.

 

Yet, he calls her "Spot" through out the episode.

 

I wonder if the engineers have a betting pool - "guess where we'll find Spot next"?

 

Yeah, in a red alert and just that one perfect cat is the one who will curl up by your leg without realizing it, you trip over him, and he meows in protest...

Not to mention, if the cats are breeding on ship, then where's the palm beacon with the UV mode so everyone can see where Spot, Mittens, Muffles, Rum, and every other cat had marked all their favorite territory areas? Must smell real nice too, if nobody knows where to clean it - it is a big ship...

 

Yup. And probably because only Data and Geordi can see where the "spot" is...

 

About Data and Spot, apparently Data wasn't much of a pet owner.
Many different cats played Spot, who knows how Data treated the poor thing.

 

I briefly read pests roaming the halls, to I thought this was about rats and mice aboard ...

Given that the Ent-D was originally conceived of as a kind of town-but-traveling-in-space I would imagine cats to be roaming around (and occasionally produce offspring) in much the same way as in small towns on earth today. But yeah, some sensitive areas with delicate equipment probably are protected.

 

Now why would that be necessary?

 

"Engine room, this is the captain. Cancel warp core ejection, repeat, cancel warp core ejection."
"Too late captain! Warp core has been ejected and the detonation sequence has been activated and cannot be aborted! We better get as far away as possible in those 50 seconds left!"
"How so? I didn't give those orders yet!"
"Spot jumped on the console and touched a few of those red buttons, sir!"

 

Remember what happened with Timothy in "Hero Worship", too. Makes sense to have a failsafe against kids, animals, and clueless passengers.

 

He does it often.



Not all instances are shown, as there's one from "Data's Day" where, oops, a clear bowl is introduced to Spot with food in it, and there's a bug crawling around on it. I couldn't find a HD clip of the infamous scene, but it does prove @at Quark's point above regarding pestilence-carrying critters that also roam the ship, hence the membrane touchpad controls being sealed to prevent an entire list of oils and fluids from causing short-circuits. (Technically they were more or less soft stations, just tell Computer you want x department console and it appears. Like the best of remote PC access combined with Android touchscreen phones all rolled into one. And among other ship crew, Yar certainly knows that for sure!

 

I suppose it helps make the ship feel like home; knowing on your way to your duty station, you might find a cat roaming the halls that you can stoop to pet.

How do they keep the roaming cats from running into other animals they could fight with?

 

It's also good, cheap exercise for the back and legs. Have enough cats on board and one can get a whole set of leg bend exercises done in half an hour by scritching them all!

 

I was never impressed by Data's poem, when he said Spot isn't sentient.

 

Not really Data's fault individually, characters in Star Trek has been using "sentient" when they should have been using "sapient" since the beginning of TNG and maybe even in TOS as well.