A little essay that i did on the Dominion Wars forums a month or so ago entitled "Why the Federation Slept". Enjoy!:
We know that they're cute. We know that they're furry. We know that they have no discernible faces or limbs. We know that the Klingons dislike them to the point of exterminating the entire species. But what else have we learned about these creatures from Star Trek? Well, I'm here to inform you all about some things that I've gleaned by reading between the lines, as it were.
Fact: The Tribbles were a species of small furry animals that ate voraciously, and bred prodigiously.
Fact: The Klingons apparently have hated the little creatures since they first encountered them.
Fact: The Federation first encountered Tribbles in the 2260's, during a time of open hostility with the Klingon Empire.
Fact: The Fedration mended fences with the Klingons in the wake of the explosion of the Klingon moon Praxis, and the subsequent Khitomer accords in the 2280's.
Fact: By the 2370's, the Tribbles had long since been annihilated by the Klingons.
Fact: Lieutenant Worf, a Klingon officer in Starfleet knows that he is allergic to Tribbles.
Fact: Worf is only in his 30's during the 2360's-2370's, leading us to surmise that he was born in the 2330's.
Fact: The Klingons and the Federation had been living in relative peace for decades prior to Worf's birth.
What I am getting at with these facts is to establish a rough time frame for the premeditated genocidal campaign conducted against the Tribbles by the Klingon Empire.
I don't know about you, but I have had an allergy test. They aren't very fun, as they involve multiple needle pokes to do. The Allergist who did this test never once told me that I was allergic to Tyrranosaurs, Dodos, Passenger Pigeons, or any other extinct species of plant or animal, even though I might very well be. Why? Because there was no chance that I'd ever encounter one of them, since they were all extinct before I was born.
Worf knows that he is allegic to Tribbles, which leads us to believe that they were still around while he was alive. No sense even telling him that he was allergic to a species that he would never encounter.
This sets the time frame for the extinction of Tribbles to somewhere from 2230-2370.
This time frame coincides with a strengthening of the bond between the Federation and the Klingons.
I propose to you readers that the Federation stood idly by as their new allies, the Klingons, committed a galactic-scale campaign of genocide against the Tribbles! So much for Federation idealism! Was it merely "inconvenient" for them to intervene in an ally's bloody campaign of hatred and wanton destruction? Why did the Federation do nothing to prevent the complete eradication of a species? Would it have been difficult to save the Tribbles from dissapearing into memory? All that one would need to do is take two of the little critters to an unpopulated world, their natural propensity to breed would have done the rest.
The ultimate question is, did the Tribbles pay the price for the Federation-Klingon Alliance with their cute, little, furry lives?
Topic: For AGE: Tribbles (Read 1425 times)