Captain archer was linked with his own future, and he was almost religiously against transporter tech straight out of the gate, to a degree that seems weird if he didn’t have a reason to be.
I understand the narrative reasons for this, but looking at him as a person, he seems overly Luddite with respect to this specific tech, in a way he isn’t with most others we can see. He’s actually pretty progressive with respect to his society in many facets.
That’s a bit weird, unless we consider his life includes time travel as a core concept, so he knew Scotty would lose Porthos, and though he couldn’t do anything about that, he had an almost innate distrust of transporters.
Does that make sense?
(I mostly mean the events of ENT and some TNG, VOY, all new movies since 2009, etc in that timeline, but perhaps the other, too)
It’s possible for there to be a 130-year-old Admiral Archer still living when Kirk commands the Enterprise, but not a 105-year-old Porthos. Medical science might increase the lifespan of pets, but not by that much.
Long ago, someone online posited that Archer just got into raising Beagles in retirement so the one Scotty lost was a likely a descendant of Porthos.
I’m sure he was just on Porthos XIV or something at that point.