The Klingons' Trouble with Tribbles

This was initially written as a reply to a YouTube reply comment to a video.

The smuggler, who boarded the Deep Space Station K-7 in TOS: "The Trouble with Tribbles", was simply the Klingons' fall guy.

My best supposition is, that Klingons are allergic to Tribbles — so much so, that their presence causes the Klingons' appearance and other physical properties to change (to and fro), and to become more Human-like.

Since the Tribbles appeared to have been used to eat away grain (necessary for food, obviously), then I theorise, that the Klingons used to lurch them around on the edges of Federation space to cause mayhem — crop failure, famine, starvation, and ultimately, colony failure. (We should note, that when a youth, Captain Kirk survived an unrelated colony failure incident on Tarsus IV.)

What caused the Klingons to pick a fight with the Enterprise crew on the K-7 Station, was, that the Klingons were actually afraid, that the Enterprise crew knew or maybe suspected — supposedly by way of their presence — that the Tribbles, as they'd actually been carried by the Klingons, caused those Klingons to turn Human-like, and their Human-like appearance was then like a give-away, that the Klingons were the ones to have carried the Tribbles, and not the poor smuggler. Well, the Enterprise crew did not know.

I suppose, that the Klingon-engineered virus picked up and re-sequenced from the Augment embryos had a substantial effect on the Klingon population, and while the warrior race mostly recovered from it, then they were not completely healed from it either, as the presence of Tribbles would re-trigger the affliction in anyone who was sufficiently close to them.