Rat (Pearls Before Swine)

This is a partial list of characters in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis.

Rat is a megalomaniacal, misanthropic rat, who is frequently critical of the strip's style and artwork, as well as the other characters in his and other strips, real life people, and almost all living (and often nonliving) things. He believes himself to be much more intelligent than he actually is, and thinks more or less anybody else is stupid with the only person he believes worthy of his respect being Leonardo da Vinci. He tends to irritate people, particularly his intelligent friend Goat, and is easily irritated by his naïve, dim-witted housemate Pig. Rat believes himself to be the wisdom of the strip, if not wisdom itself, and that anybody else is more or less dumb, whereas most other characters view him as "a loudmouth, pompous malcontent". He may or may not be a personification of the Seven Deadly Sins.

He is also shown to be easily upset. On one occasion, the diner that most of the characters frequent changed the color of their stools, which upset him as he claimed he did not like change. Goat attempted to console him, saying "It's a chair", but Rat simply responded that he was going home to cry in his closet. Rat is very prideful and arrogant (he once made a list of all the geniuses in the world that only said "Mozart, da Vinci, Me", and then said that he only put 'that music dude' there to be nice), and is constantly dreaming up schemes that invariably would keep him away from anyone and everyone else, though these inevitably backfire. He often appears incapable of seeing his own faults.

Rat is also a con artist, as he is often taking up professions he knows almost nothing about and charging people a lot of money, often insulting or confusing his customers, co-workers and boss in the process. He is often self-employed, using his jobs to trick vain, unintelligent people into either giving him money or making them do things for him. In one instance, he even started a big controversy over a bogus weight-loss scheme he created, involving the starvation of obese people, that wound up on the Senate floor. At times, other companies make the mistake of hiring him, in which case Rat is usually rude to his customers and employers.

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