The Jenets, or Jenet, were a species of sentient, humanoid rodents, best known for their exceptional memories and scavenger nature. Other species often regarded Jenets as ugly and quarrelsome. They had pink skin, red eyes, and wiry fur, which grew sparsely on the body but more thickly on their heads. Their prominent whiskers twitched as they spoke. As adaptations to aid scavenging, they could digest almost any form of organic matter, and could rely upon keen eyesight, hearing, and smell. The species were excellent runners, climbers, and swimmers, and their flexible bodies allowed them to squeeze through openings as narrow as twelve centimeters by disjointing their long limbs and separating their cranial plates. Jenet reproductive biology encouraged rapid population growth, as both gestation and maturation occurred rapidly in comparison to those processes in many other species.

Originally from the planet Garban in the Tau Sakar system, the Jenets evolved into cunning survivalists who systematically drove into extinction those species that preyed upon them, an event they remembered as the Great Conquest. The exception was the danchaf, a clever arboreal species whose presence in Garban's forests prevented the Jenets from fully dominating such areas. As their technology progressed, the Jenets colonized the six other habitable planets that orbited Tau Sakar to ameliorate conditions on their increasingly overcrowded homeworld. Their communities across the system were distinguished by the species' tortuous bureaucracy, made up of Jenets whose jobs were simply to commit to memory as many facts about their fellows as possible. Jenet eidetic recall influenced social relations, as a Jenet's name contained a long list of his or her deeds and accomplishments and informed others of that individual's status in Jenet society. The rulers of the species were the Council of 127 and the premier. Jenet populations maintained Community Heaps, cooperatively owned landfills replete with scavenged and discarded items. With the ascension of Galactic Emperor Palpatine and the institution of the New Order, the Galactic Empire found the Jenets to be useful as slaves, because the rodents' high reproductive rate allowed their masters to pay little attention to the detrimental effects of poor labor and living conditions.

Those Jenets who migrated beyond the Tau Sakar system often found employment in fields that made use of their infallible memories, such as government, administration, and business. For example, a Jenet named Losh worked in the civil service divisions on Coruscant and helped Captain Gregar Typho of Naboo investigate the death of Padmé Amidala. However, other Jenets ventured into the galaxy's criminal element. The Invisible Shell, for instance, was a crime ring operated by a clan of Jenets on the planet Pavo Prime under the leadership of a male named Lorimar Lebauer. The species' ability to remember even minor details of things they had seen or heard also made them excellent spies. Despite their mistreatment by the Empire, few Jenets supported the Alliance to Restore the Republic or joined its successor state, the New Republic. After the Republic transitioned to the Galactic Alliance, at least some Jenets allied with the government; two such were Thorsh, a Jenet espionage agent during the Yuuzhan Vong War, and Reeqo Swen, a Jenet Jedi-in-training. (Read more…)