Because of Animal Stereotypes, a simple way to show a character's personality is to give them characteristics of — or even portray them as — an animal. However, many works will take things a step further and associate entire occupations with animals.
This is very common in World of Funny Animals settings, but human-focused stories may simply focus on giving the characters Animal Motifs depending on their job as well. People in a certain profession may have some specific animals as pets or mascots. This may be done as a way for the author to express their feelings about certain occupations; animals considered likable may be used as positive representations of certain jobs, while animals considered unlikable may be used for negative representations. Sometimes, associating an animal with a job is done more neutrally, often as a comparison to the real species' ecological niche and behavior.
This is often an opportunity to utilize Good Animals, Evil Animals. "Good" animals may be portrayed in heroic or noble jobs, while "evil" animals will often be portrayed as criminals. The exact level of criminality can differ depending on the individual animal, too. For instance, raccoons and weasels are commonly depicted as crooks, but are usually thieves, con artists, or otherwise part of the Quirky Miniboss Squad as opposed to serious criminals.
Many animal job stereotypes will be Visual Puns as well. For example, a Loan Shark may be depicted as an actual shark, or an Amoral Attorney / Hanging Judge may be a kangaroo, as a pun on Kangaroo Court. References to the collective nouns of the animal's species are also fairly common, such as a businessman that's a ferret (in reference to a group of ferrets being called a business), or a fish that's either a student or a teacher (in reference to a group of fish being called a school).
It is also very common to portray animals working in jobs that their real-life equivalents are often involved in, such as dogs that work as police officers, rabbits and farm animals that work as farmers, or dalmatians that are firefighters.
For general examples of animals being hardworking, see Busy Beaver, Diligent Draft Animal, and Virtuous Bees. For animals that are typically not portrayed as hardworking, see Cats Are Lazy, Sluggish Seal, Laid-Back Koala, and Sluggish Sloths. Compare Powersuit Monkey for cases of non-anthropomorphic animals (especially primates, as the trope name suggests) working in human jobs, often for comedy. Also compare literal versions of All Drummers Are Animals.
For mythical creatures being associated with certain occupations, see Corporate Dragon and Vampires Own Night Clubs.
This is a sub-trope of Animal Stereotypes. Compare with National Animal Stereotypes, Stock Animal Behavior, and Stock Animal Diet, which this can also have some overlap with, as well as with Occupation Personality Stereotypes.
For more coherent list of jobs that animals are commonly portrayed as working in, see the analysis page.
Sub-tropes:
This is a super-trope to the following tropes and is meant to collect miscellaneous examples. If your example fits better under one of these tropes, add it to that one instead:- Angry Guard Dog: Dogs as aggressive guards.
- Apes in Space: Primates as astronauts or other space adventurers.
- Boxing Kangaroo: Kangaroos as boxers or kickboxers.
- Cat Ninja: Cats as ninjas.
- Dapper Penguin: Penguins as waiters, or any job that requires a tuxedo.
- Delivery Stork: Storks that deliver babies. This is traditionally represented by them bringing a baby to a couple, but anthropomorphic storks may also be depicted working in delivery wards.
- Fighting Panda: Pandas (both red and giant) as martial artists.
- Firehouse Dalmatian: Dalmatians as firefighters, or associated with firehouses.
- Frog Ninja: Frogs as ninjas.
- Golfing Gator: Crocodilians as golfers.
- King of Beasts: Lions as monarchs or other leaders.
- Literal Cat Burglar: Cats as thieves, rogues, and burglars.
- Mole Miner: Small burrowing mammals, such as moles and gophers, have jobs relating to digging underground.
- Pirate Parrot: Parrots associated with, or portrayed as, pirates.
- Pirate Shark: Sharks who are pirates.
- Police Pig: Pigs as law enforcement officers, often in a satirical/derogatory way.
- Policeman Dog: Dogs as law enforcement officers, investigators and guards.
- Rabbit Magician: Rabbits as witches or wizards. Rabbits are also commonly depicted as stage magicians.
- Researcher Rodent: Rats, mice, guinea pigs, and other rodents depicted as being scientists, researchers, inventors, or similar professions.
- Semiaquatic Species Sailor: Semi-aquatic animals, such as ducks, otters, and seals in nautical jobs, such as sailors, pirates, and fishermen.
- Singing Frogs: Frogs depicted as singers or musicians.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A famous commercial for Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate features a gorilla playing "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins on the drums.
- McGruff the Crime Dog is an anthropomorphic bloodhound mascot intended to raise awareness about crime prevention. He's styled like a detective or private investigator, wearing a trenchcoat with a high collar, so it's likely that he's meant to be a detective in-universe.
- Tommy McAnairey: Tommy's ancestors including his late Uncle Pat worked detecting carbon monoxide fumes in coal mines.
- An anthropomorphic fox is the mascot for Old Speckled Hen bitter. Depending on the campaign he's sometimes portrayed as a Roguish Poacher looking for a real hen.
Anime & Manga
- Aggretsuko: Washimi is a secretary bird, as well as the company's secretary.
Art
- Creepazoids:
- Angler from the third Fan Zone is an anglerfish fisherman.
- Dr. Quack from series 33 is a duckperson in the (dubious) medical field.
Comic Books
- Blacksad:
- Zigzagged overall: Some animals have a profession their species make them suited for (a beaver architect, bear, rhino and crocodile henchmen, German Shepherd cop), others that are unexpected (a koala ringmaster, a jackal FBI agent, a (heroic) hyena lawyer), and some are on either side (Blacksad and Hitler are both cats, one fox is a cop and another is a racist murderer)... Further muddying the waters is the fact that discrimination seems based more on origin than species: The Klan's equivalent has all sorts of (white-furred) animals like polar bears, owls, goats...
- The In-Universe B-Movie Blacksad has to watch while waiting for a witness plays it straight: the president is a bald eagle, the general is a lion, the scientist is an anteater...
- Last of the Sandwalkers: Professor Bombardier is a bombardier beetle who can spray burning chemicals from her rear. She's also a genius chemist and Lucy's science mentor. There's also Mossy, a rhinoceros beetle who acts as the team's big guy.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) features a duck doctor named Doctor Quack.
Comic Strips
- Some early strips of Pearls Before Swine showed a pair of hyenas invoking this trope by pretending to be funeral directors, while repeatedly asking Zebra to send them any dead relatives of his so that they could eat them.
Fan Works
- Kosperry
's fan animations reimagine scenes from different series with the cast as Funny Animals. In the clips based on Seinfeld, stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld is fittingly portrayed as a hyena.
- The Multi-Animator Project A GIRL CALLED LAKE (organized by WereClancy) reimagines the humanoid characters of Infinity Train as anthropomorphic animals. The Mirror Police are depicted as dogs.
Films — Animation
- The Aristocats: Scat Cat is a jazz musician.
- Az Erdő Kapitánya:
- The eponymous Kapitány is a dog police chief.
- Zéró and his henchman Piroska are literal cat burglars.
- The two hostages that Zero orders Piroska to kidnap in the first act also fall into this trope: Rita Canari is an opera singer canary, while Professor Arara is a parrot who is a professor of linguistics.
- In Brambletown, there's a raccoon that works in the junkyard, finding ways to reuse things people have thrown out.
- Cars does this with vehicles. For example, Lightning McQueen is a race car, Sheriff is a police car, Sarge is an army jeep, Fillmore is a hippie van, the pit crew members are all forklifts, etc.
- The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under: Orville and Wilbur are albatrosses who run their own airline business. Fittingly, they don't so much fly planes as they are planes themselves.
- Robin Hood (1973):
- In this film, Robin Hood is depicted as a fox.
- King Richard and Prince John are both lions. However, John subverts many of the tropes associated with his species.
- Prince John's guards are rhinoceroses. Some of his heralds are elephants, trumpeting with their trunks.
- The Sheriff of Nottingham and many of his soldiers are wolves.
- Narrator Allan-a-Dale is a minstrel rooster.
- Sir Hiss is a manipulative and hypnotic python who is Prince John’s Evil Chancellor.
- Rock-A-Doodle: After being cast out of the farm, Chanticleer the rooster becomes an Elvis-like rock'n'roll singer.
- Sing:
- Zootopia: Noted in-universe. There's an expectation that Zootopia's citizens go into professions associated with their species' real or supposed temperaments.
- Played straight with Judy Hopps' parents, as well as many of the other residents of Bunnyburrow, who are rabbits that work as farmers. Judy herself averts this, however, as she aspires to be a police officer, which is a very unorthodox career for a rabbit to want — she's the city's very first rabbit policewoman.
- The Zootopia Police Department is almost entirely made up of large and intimidating animals, both predators and prey. Some of them include rhinos, an elephant, a buffalo, a lion, a tiger, a bear, and a wolf. When Judy first joins the force, she struggles to be taken seriously among them, due to being a small rabbit.
- Some minor characters seen at one point are construction worker beavers.
- Duke Weaselton is a weasel that is portrayed as a thief and bootlegger.
- Nick Wilde, a fox, is portrayed as a crafty con artist. Played for Drama when it's revealed that he turned to this lifestyle after getting bullied in his childhood just for being a fox, and decided that he was going to be a con artist if that's how the world saw him.
- Played for Laughs with Zootopia's Department of Motor Vehicles (or rather, DMZ — it's not clear what the acronym stands for, but it is clearly legally distinct), an institution that in real life has a reputation for agonizingly slow service forcing people to wait for hours — so it's staffed by sloths who waste Nick and Judy's time.
Films — Live-Action
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks:
- An octopus is the drummer of the underwater band.
- The right-hand advisor to the king, a lion is a secretary bird.
- A pair of vultures are the paramedics of the soccer match. A Running Gag is them excitedly starting to run over to collect Mr. Browne whenever he gets trampled by the animals, only for them to become disappointed and walk away when they learn that he's still alive.
- Mary Poppins: In the "Jolly Holiday" sequence, the waiters who serve refreshments to Mary and Bert are penguins wearing bow ties.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Hector Barbossa, a pirate, has a pet capuchin monkey named Jack.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
- Early in the film, one of the cartoon characters seen is a pelican postman.
- Judge Doom's henchmen are weasel crooks.
- The Ink and Paint Club is a speakeasy-style establishment staffed by bowtie-wearing penguin waiters. They're not very competent, though — when private eye Eddie Valiant orders a drink "on the rocks," it's served with an actual rock in the glass instead of ice.
- The club's bouncer is a Killer Gorilla.
Literature
- In a number of Ivan Krylov's fables, the fox is the one serving as the Amoral Attorney.
- In the kids' book Felix Feels Better, the doctor is a duck.
- Fantastic Mr. Fox is the page image for Roguish Poacher.
- Sam Pig features a fox who is a Con Man.
- In a literary fable by Polish writer Jan Brzechwa, forest animals set up a co-op to stop their exploitation by two unscrupulous merchants, the wolf and the lynx. The fox is a lumpenproletarian type who hires himself out to the two until he sees the co-op is in his interest as well.
Live-Action TV
- Grimm: One of the Wesen species is the Eisbiber, or "Beaver", depicted as a hard-working laborer, usually involved in plumbing or construction trades. The recurring character Bud, a plumber who accidentally discovered his customer was the Grimm protagonist, was terrified at first, but eventually became an ally and helper.
- The Sarah Jane Adventures: The episode "Death of the Doctor" introduces the Claw Shan Sheeth, a race of alien vultures who serve as morticians to the universe. They claim to be bringing The Doctor's body to Earth for burial. In reality, they are tired of the death and destruction they witness regularly and want to steal the TARDIS to change all of time and prevent it.
Mythology & Religion
- Egyptian Mythology: Anubis is the god of death, mummification, and the underworld, and is portrayed as a jackal-headed man (or an actual jackal).
- In Hinduism, Kali is often depicted riding a tiger. She is also the goddess of power and destruction.
Puppet Shows
- Sesame Street: In an "Elmo's World" skit, one doctor features who is a duck, as a pun on "quack" meaning a phony doctor.
Tabletop Games
- Part of the setting of Eclipse Phase is that there's plenty of uplifted animals around, whom the game treats in all seriousness as an occasionally-discriminated, occasionally-fetishized minority. It's remarked that animal stereotypes are one of many problems they have to deal with: people tend to assume orcas are creepy psychos, whales are puzzling mystics, dolphins are these funny playful fellas, bonobos are sex fiends, and so on. More often than not it's subverted (because, you know, these are stereotypes, not hard facts), but Stealthy Cephalopod is played more-or-less straight as there's a genuine mafia run by a bunch of creepy, secretive octopi.
- Kabuto Sumo:
- Dr. Bibble is a pillbug in the medical field.
- Mother Superior is a praying mantis nun.
Video Games
- Animal Crossing:
- Redd is a fox who sells the player various expensive goods. However, some of these items are just common items or forged art pieces sold at an inflated price, making him a fox con-man.
- Booker and Copper are a pair of dogs who are either police officers or guards (depending on the game).
- Orville and Wilbur are a humorous take on this trope; birds acting as pilots isn't unexpected… except these are dodo birds, birds that are famous for the fact that they can't fly.
- Pelly, Phyllis, and Pete are pelicans who work at a post office.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: Don Weaso is a weasel, and is the head of the fittingly named Weasel Mafia. Funnily enough, Weasels also show up as the guards to the tank Weaso sends Conker to rob.
- In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, several vendors are rooted in Pokémon stereotypes.
- Makuhita, a pugnacious punching bag-like Pokémon, runs a dojo in the Rescue Team games.
- Audino, a Pokémon known for healing others, works as a doctor in Super Mystery Dungeon.
- Klefki is a Pokémon adorned with keys that don't serve much purpose. In Super Mystery Dungeon, he's hired to unlock treasure chests.
- Pelipper is based on a pelican. In the Rescue Team games, a group of Pelipper run the post office.
- Sly Cooper is a raccoon Gentleman Thief. As for his rogues' gallery and the like:
- Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus introduces the bulldog gangster Muggshot and the Fighting Panda known as the Panda King. The background police officers that follow Carmelita are pigs.
- Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves features the mouse mechanic Penelope and the Pirate Parrot captain known as LeFwee.
- Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time has El Jefe, a tiger mercenary and conqueror-for-hire.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Espio the Chameleon is a ninja who can turn invisible.
- Big the Cat is a fisherman, which is based on the stereotype that cats eat fish.
- Tail Concerto involves Dog Police chasing literal cat-burglars (who are also Sky Pirates). Drama occurs when the top police dog and leader of the cat thieves, recognize each other from their childhood and their old attraction starts reigniting!
- Webkinz features a duck named Doctor Quack who works as a doctor.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends:
- Lifty and Shifty the thieves are raccoons.
- Handy the beaver is a carpenter.
- Russel the Pirate is a sea otter.
Webcomics
- Awful Hospital: Dr. Phage is obsessed with ducks as a reference to him being an incompetent doctor, or a quack doctor.
- Carry On: Kathy is a hyena and a journalist who originally wrote obituaries before the plot advanced. Her father is a mortician who often, shall we say, brings clients home for dinner. Her older sister Sandy seems to buck the trend by being an EMT, except that she has been known to eat patients who didn't make it to the hospital. Later on though, we see a kingdom in Africa ruled by hyenas (Kathy and Sandy being third-generation Americans) and they seem to be more of a Proud Warrior Race who hire themselves out as mercenaries.
- Kevin & Kell:
- Dr Caduceus is a snake and the family doctor. Fiona's former college roommate Greta Gartersnake is studying medicine.
- Most lawyers are sharks, to the extent that the only one we've seen who isn't describes having to learn scuba-diving to attend law school.
- Litterbox Comics:
- A recurring character in the webcomic is an owl that serves as the teacher to the family's older son.
- One bonus panel of the strip shows a rhinoceros cop.
- Pixie and Brutus features a former military dog — a German shepherd named Brutus — being sent to live with a suburban family after his time in the service is over. He's portrayed similarly to a human soldier with hints of being a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
- Forestdale has a whole family of dalmatians, the Burnsides, in the firefighting business. Both parents and their eldest son are employed as fire fighters while their youngest son's dream job is to follow in his family's footsteps and become a firefighter when he grows up.
- The Whiteboard:
- The fire department is mostly staffed by Dalmatians, along with a cat and a German Shepherd.
- Mikki, a husky, is a barista now but suggested her previous job involved pulling a sled across the Alaskan snow.
- Packrat apparently has a history as a thief and con artist, and he tries to steal Doc's wormhole gun.
Websites
- Duolingo is an educational language-learning game. The mascot (as well as the instructor in the lessons) is an owl named Duo.
Western Animation
- Alfred J. Kwak:
- Alfred's adoptive father Henk is some kind of a miner.
- The walrus Stoppel is a cargo ship's captain and his whole crew are seals.
- Waterland's navy seems to be all-seal except for one orangutan officer. Their king, as well as the king of neighboring Reedland, are both lions.
- Inspector Holmes is a police dog.
- Pel the pelican is a lighthouse keeper.
- Lispel the octopus is a spy for hire.
- Beavers are seen as construction workers.
- Ant soldiers, an apothecary vulture, tiger warriors, an owl professor, an owl judge, and lions working as circus assistants are also briefly seen.
- Alfred himself, a duck, was a sea scout as a child and tried out a job as a clown when he was a young adult (though he doesn't appear to have an actual job).
- BoJack Horseman makes plenty use of Animal Stereotypes for jokes and gags, so this particular subtrope naturally comes into play sometimes.
- "Bojack Hates the Troops" revolves around Bojack's petty dispute with a man known as "Neal McBeal the Navy Seal"; just as that punny title implies, Neal McBeal is an anthropomorphic seal and US Navy veteran of the Afghanistan War. Though the Ambiguous Syntax makes it unclear about whether or not he was specifically a member of the Navy SEALs special forces unit.
- Bonkers: The title protagonist is a toon bobcat who works as a cop for the LAPD with a human partner, either Miranda Wright or Lucky Piquel.
- Martha Speaks: Professor Monkey is a monkey trained to work in a lab.
- PAW Patrol: Two of the PAW Patrol fall into this trope: Marshall the Dalmatian is a firefighter, while Chase the German Shepard is a police officer.
- Quick Draw McGraw: The title character is a Funny Animal horse, whose job is that of a sheriff during The Wild West.
- Zootopia+: The episode "Dinner Rush" shows an anthropomorphic pig chef/restaurant owner, who is named Gerald.