Talking Pet

This article refers to the Ur-Quan translator species of talking pets. For information about the specific Talking Pet who became The Captain's neo-Dnyarri ally see: Talking Pet (device).

All species that have had dealing with Ur-Quan are familiar with the small, quadrupedal creatures with atrophied limbs and huge craniums called Talking Pets. The Ur-Quan find inter-species translation as a supremely demeaning task, opting instead for employing Talking Pets, who, in their own small chambers, appear to speak and listen on behalf of the Ur-Quan. However, the Ur-Quan always make themselves visible during communications and make it clear that they, in fact, are the source of the communications and the Talking Pets are merely translation tools. Each Ur-Quan ship, whether Kzer-Za or Kohr-Ah, comes equipped with at least a Talking Pet.

Until the events of Star Control II made many aspects of the Ur-Quan's history clear, most Alliance members assumed the Talking Pets were merely a convenient translation device created by genetic engineering. However, the Talking Pets are far more; they are a crucial symbol of the Ur-Quan's status of dominance and of their long-ago escape from slavery.

The Talking Pets are the genetic descendants of the sentient Dnyarri species who had once enslaved the original Ur-Quan and the Sentient Milieu through mental compulsion. After the Ur-Quan successfully defeated the Dnyarri in their slave revolt and all Dnyarri except those remaining on the surface of Glilandy had been exterminated, the orbiting Ur-Quan captains who held Glilandy under siege decided that extermination would be too kind for the Dnyarri. Instead, the Ur-Quan decided to use their former masters as slaves, in revenge for their generations of suffering and as a reminder of their great victory. Ur-Quan scientists were able to extract the last of the Dnyarri population and genetically alter them, devolving their intelligence and personality down to sub-sentient levels, leaving them little more than biological machines.

Unfortunately, Ur-Quan genetic manipulation technology was not subtle enough to erase all traces of the Dnyarri's former intellectual capacity or to detect the traces that remained. When the Umgah, with their far superior genetic engineering abilities, managed to examine a Talking Pet recovered from a Dreadnought crash, they were able to augment its intelligence and racial memory far past its original abilities, turning it into a powerful neo-Dnyarri that played a crucial role in The Captain's efforts to destroy the Sa-Matra and defeat the Ur-Quan.