Resourceful Rodent

Although mice, rats, and other rodents are usually seen as timid and cowardly animals who avoid danger by running and hiding from them, these particular rodents are pragmatic. They will use their assets and environments to their full advantage to survive and escape adversity.

It is said that a rat will do anything to survive, no matter how disgraceful or dishonorable their tactics are. A resourceful rodent will rarely engage in head-on confrontations, or fight fairly for that matter because they know they can be easily overpowered.

Since rodents are usually prey animals in the food chain, they have to be especially vigilant and more aware of their surroundings. For this reason, resourceful Rodents have to be smart enough to use their cunning and high intellect to escape from danger and outwit their stronger enemies. They often use their inventions to survive and utilize whatever they can find to defend themselves from others.

The Resourceful rodent can fit any definition; a Genius Bruiser/Badass Bookworm who strategically fights their enemies with whatever they have at their disposal, The Engineer who invents, rebuilds, and repurposes items from junk, and the sly and underhanded rogue who uses their resourcefulness to hastily and stealthily evade enemies and catch them off-guard.

Resourceful Rodents are not strictly anthropomorphic; a trained rodent, an intelligent rodent, and even an entire group of rodents who create strategies and hunting tactics to take on larger prey can fit here as well.

It can go with Bamboo Technology, Improbable Weapon User, Improvisational Ingenuity, MacGyvering, and Scavenged Punk since the animal can display ingenuity by repurposing junk as tools, weapons, transportation, or inventions. It also goes with Guile Hero and The Trickster since the rodent in question has to defeat larger enemies who are vastly stronger than them.

This has some elements of being Truth in Television. In real life, rats are actually very intelligent and social creatures; they are also scavengers who take whatever food they can get. In one experiment in 2016, rats have been observed to use tools to access food but could not use them to their full capabilities due to their poor eyesight. In addition, due to being small prey animals, rodents need to rely on caution and stealth to avoid enemies much stronger and larger than themselves.

See also Intelligent Gerbil, Nice Mice, Screwball Squirrel, You Dirty Rat!, and Suicidal Lemmings. If the rats are half-human, then it's Rat Men. Rodents of Unusual Size may apply if the animal fits the criteria for the resourceful rodent.

It may overlap with Mouse World, which often involves rodent characters repurposing human objects as tools. It may also overlap with Scavenged Punk (and therefore averting Scavengers Are Scum) since it can involve rodent characters using materials scavenged or stolen from humans. It may or may not be The Lab Rat (literally), which does the forensics and other research.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' mentor Splinter has taught the turtles to be a ninja team, though it varies between incarnations on whether he's a rat given humanlike attributes after being mutated or a man turned into a rat.

Fan Works

• Junior Officers: Sarabi Squirrel is rather clever. After having been neglected by her mother in her childhood, she has become independent as well as a very skilled chef. She's also quick-witted in missions and knows how to distract others to beat them in arm wrestling.

Films — Animation

• Chicken Run: Subverted; Nick and Fetcher is a pair of merchants and smugglers who take whatever they can get so they can sell them as tools for the chickens. They use a toffee tin as a suitcase and they offer a shuttlecock as a veil, a thimble as a cup, and a sink plug as a pendant. However, the pair aren't that smart because they didn't realize that roosters don't lay eggs. They are instrumental in the chickens' escape because they steal the necessary tools from the farmers by disguising themselves as garden gnomes.
• In Cinderella, the mice are quite ingenious in their abilities to help Cinderella. Jaq and Gus get a whole necklace of beads from the stepsisters' room to Cinderella's by stringing them on their tails (while evading Lucifer the cat the entire time). Meanwhile, the female mice rig up a pulley system with the friendly bluebirds to sew her dress.
• Dumbo: Timothy the Mouse is the deuteragonist of the film who helps Dumbo in the circus. He gets Dumbo into the circus by planting ideas in the ringmaster's head while the latter is sleeping and he convinces Dumbo that he can fly with a magic feather (a normal feather that Timothy was given by a crow who plucked from one of his goons).
• Flushed Away: The sewer population is composed of rats who have used junk to build their city, their transportation, and their equipment.
• The Great Mouse Detective: The rat population lives in dens inside the houses of humans and repurposes junk as household items. Basil also brags about his intelligence and cunning, which is shown by how he was able to escape a deathtrap by turning the traps against each other. He also survives a fall from Big Ben by using a broken propeller to climb back up to safety while Rattigan seemingly falls to his death.
• Ratatouille:
  • Rémy is able to cook in a haute cuisine restaurant undetected by controlling a chef via pulling the hairs on his head. He also has an exceptional eye for ingredients, which is evident when he improves a soup using seemingly random ingredients scattered around the kitchen.
  • The rest of his colony counts for this trope as well, since they were able to fashion together makeshift tables, boats, and even instruments using regular household items.
• The Secret of NIMH: The rats of NIMH are able to read as a result of the experiments scientists conducted on them. They also know how to work with technology.
• Valiant: The French resistance is composed of two mice who use match sticks as incendiary weapons.

Films — Live-Action

• The Green Mile: In the movie adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, Mr. Jingles was trained by Eduard Delacroix to play fetch with a wooden spool. In behind-the-scenes footage, they had between 15 and 30 trained mice for the scenes of Mr. Jingles. Only using animatronics and CGI for the death and resurrection of Mr. Jingles.
• MouseHunt: The mouse is shown living in the walls and using cotton as bedding and a metal box as a bed. The mouse also has to outwit Lars and Ernie, who plan to sell the house after learning of its high value.
• Stuart Little: Since Stuart is the average size of a mouse he has to use toys as everyday items. He has to wear clothes from toys and use toy vehicles as transportation. In the sequel, he rebuilds a toy airplane with trash to fly it home.
• The Suicide Squad: Sebastian, Ratcatcher II's lead rat, warns the group that King Shark is about to eat Ratcatcher II, helps plan the heist to rescue Harley by counting guards through windows, and even finds a path for his master out of the Jotunheim rubble. And he has a cute little backpack on the whole time.
• The Witches (1990) and The Witches (2020): The main characters are turned into mice by witches and they have to outsmart the witches so they turn back into humans

Literature

• Aesop's Fables: The Lion and the Mouse is about a lion sparing a mouse and laughing off the idea of the mouse helping him in return since the lion considers the mouse to be too small and weak to be of any use. When the lion is caught in a net trap, the mouse is able to free him by gnawing at the rope so the lion could escape.
• Belling the Cat: The story involves a group of mice trying to figure out a way to avoid a cat that has been hunting them. One mouse states they should put a bell around the cat's neck so they'd know where it is and how to avoid it. Everyone agrees until a wise old mouse asks for a volunteer to bravely put the bell on the cat, where everyone else responds by making excuses and refusing to do it. It led to the idiom "Bell the cat", which means "To undertake or agree to perform a risky, dangerous, or impossible job or task."
• Zig-zagged in Janusz Zajdel's Cylinder Van Troffa. Rats (lots of rats) live alongside the earthlings, using tech like food dispensers and the underground. Generally, the rats seem about as intelligent as the ones in Neverwhere - no speech, but they cooperate pushing buttons and covering sensors, and giving the protagonist looks of disdain (or so he thinks). It appears that they inherit the Earth, but they die out soon after humans because they can't fend for themselves anymore and the machines break down.
• Discworld: In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the rats have human-level intelligence and can use tools. With a cat and a boy, they run a con that involves recreating The Pied Piper of Hamelin to make money. The rats are smart enough to form a dedicated "bomb disposal squad" that scouts ahead and deactivates rat traps.
• The Dream Eaters and Other Stories by Louise Searl features the short story The Redfern Rats, about a colony of rats who, with the help of the local squirrels, organise a resistance to the threat facing their home.
• The Golden Hamster Saga is about Freddy Auratus, the world's most intelligent golden hamster. In the first book he teaches himself to read by watching his six-year-old owner do her homework, figures out how to open and close his cage door by using a pencil as a lever, and learns how to use a computer to communicate with humans.
• The Green Mile: Mr. Jingles is a mouse that was caught by Eduard Delacroix to perform tricks. For his most famous trick, Delacroix would throw a wooden spool and Mr. Jingles would roll it back to him. Delacroix even jokes about the idea of joining the circus with trained mice.
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: The story is about a group of lab rats that gained human intelligence through a series of top-secret government experiments.
• The Tale of Despereaux: Despereaux uses a sewing needle as a sword and the rodent civilization often uses junk and trash as objects, clothes, etc.
• The Witches: The main character is turned into a mouse by witches and he has to outsmart the witches so he can turn back into a human.

Myths & Religion

• Eastern Zodiac:
  • The story behind the Chinese zodiac is that all 12 animals were challenged to The Great Race and they had to swim across a large river. The rat is a poor swimmer but worked around it by convincing the ox to let the rat stand on its back as the ox swims across the river. Once the rat was close enough to the riverbank, it ungratefully jumped off and ran across the finish line to get first place.
  • In addition, the reason why there's no cat in the Chinese zodiac is because of an incident with the rat, which serves as a "Just So" Story regarding why cats hate rats. There are two versions that are commonly told:
    • Version 1: The rat formed an alliance with the cat and they both rode the ox across the river. When the pair were close enough to the riverbank, the rat betrayed the cat by pushing it into the river, which caused the cat to fail to become a zodiac (either drowning or being too late to reach the riverbank).
    • Version 2: The cat asked the rat when The Great Race was going to happen. The rat knew that the race was going to take place on the first day of the New Year, but in order to increase its chances of winning, it lied to the cat, saying it was on the second day. When the cat crossed the finish line, it was a day late and thus didn't become a part of the zodiac.

Radio

• The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy 1978: In the story, Planet Earth is in reality one enormous super-computer dedicated to working out The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. Its keepers are hyper-intelligent white mice, who not only tend the computer, they run incredibly subtle and elegant psychological experiments on their human, err, "lab-rats".

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: The Ratfolk, or ysoki, are humanoid rats with a particular knack for tinkering, which grants them bonuses related to alchemy and operating magical devices. In Starfinder, they instead have a racial bonus to the Engineering and Survival skills and their largest population is on the Scavenger World of Akiton, where many of them make a living turning scrap into usable things.
• In Pugmire mice and rats are the only Uplifted Animals that can develop Psychic Powers instead of relying on ancient human artifacts to obtain Magic from Technology. Particularly favored by the Cult of Labo Tor who try to surpass Man through experiments of questionable ethics. The Squeaks in the Dark supplement that has rules for playable rodents includes a "Trickster" calling that specializes in building and setting traps, and reveals that much of their population live in a massive underground labyrinth, surviving on what they can scavenge from the ruins.
• Warhammer: The Skaven are humanoid rats living in Underground Cities and able to make devices such as the Ratling and technological devices using warpstone such as tools and power generation. The only reason why they haven't taken over the world yet is because they are infamously treacherous.
• The Rattevir of The Chronicles of Aeres are a highly intelligent race who, unlike the other Wilderkind, have abandoned the simple life of forest-folk to integrate into humanity's cities. They are regarded as some of the world's greatest apothecaries, scribes, and researchers, and are particularly well-known for their skill at alchemy.

Video Games

• Bully: Invoked as the nerd clique has an association with rats; Algie and Bucky ^note  Bucks is the name for a male rat have pet rats called "Sniffy" and "George", the gang has a collective fear of rats as shown by the mission "Rats in the Library", the group is willing to run away from a fight, use underhanded tactics, are regarded as "Sneaky bastards" by Gary Smith, and the Nerds use homemade firearms that are made from various scraps around the school. They also made an alternate route to the abandoned observatory to avoid jocks, like how rats would avoid predators by taking alternate routes and staying out of sight. The Bullworth Academy crest also has a rat as part of the design, likely referencing the nerds.
• Cuphead: Werner Werman is a rat boss who fights by using a tank that's been made from various household junk (a tin can, rubber bands, and wood) and he was able to turn a bottlecap into a buzz saw.
• Enter the Gungeon: The aptly-named Resourceful Rat is an anthropomorphic giant rat that managed to adapt himself to life in the Gungeon. He uses the ever-changing layout of the Gungeon to construct a giant maze to serve as his lair, he hoards a lot of Gungeon's treasures, and he has great expertise in scavenging and stealing stuff left by Gungeoneers, and even managed to construct a mecha out of scavenged stuff. It's stated that his resourcefulness would've let him reach The Gun That Can Kill The Past with ease, and the reason he didn't do so is that he's more interested in frustrating the Gungeoneers.
• Fallen London: The Rattus Faber are a species of sapient talking rats. They're known to be very skilled engineers and metalworkers.
• Fallout: Invoked by the perk Pack Rat, which halves the weight of items that weigh up to 2 pounds or less. The in-universe justification is that the player character can cleverly pack things more carefully by finding space in their bags or putting them in "out-of-the-way places"
  The Courier: Don't worry about me. I'm used to finding out-of-the-way places to stuff my gear.
• Ghost of a Tale: The main character, Tilo, has to outsmart the rats by hiding from them, distracting them, or by knocking them out with bottles and barrels.
• Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number: Invoked by Richter Berg, the operative who wears a rat mask. Richter has to use whatever he can find as a weapon in Wrong Number, has to be absurdly quick and jumpy to survive his levels, and doesn't have his signature silenced submachine gun. He also survives a prison riot that was orchestrated by the Janitors by using a shard of glass as a weapon (known as a shard blade in the game) and stealing a prison officer's uniform so he can be evacuated with the staff.
• Overwatch: Junkrat invokes this by having a rat as his motif and he's a demolitions expert who haphazardly makes his own explosives with scrap metal and car parts.
• A Plague Tale: Innocence: At first, the man-eating rats in the game seem disorganized and chaotic, and are physically unable to enter the light, which is your main defense strategy. As their influence grows, they develop strategies to counter this, using their own bodies in formations and directed attacks to bust through the light and extinguish fires.
• Planescape: Torment: A single cranium rat doesn't do much, but when many of them band together, they get stronger and gain magical abilities, going so far as to develop a united collective consciousness in their domain. So this is exactly what they do, use seemingly harmless lone rats to lure you into an ambush. On top of that, their allied wererats are used as double agents in order to spy on and destroy the neighbouring enclaves.
• Shovel Knight: The propeller rats are airborne enemies that wear propellers strapped to their backs. They are smart enough to wield weapons such as scissors and bombs to use against the protagonists.
• Total War: Warhammer II: The Skaven are an incredibly intelligent species of rats that can build advanced technology and are the masters of stealth just like the source material.

Web Original

• Pirates SMP: Martyn's stream chat manifest as rats which he keeps in his boots. They engage in Filching Food for Fun on a regular basis; on Day 85, they even prepare to steal and preserve the fish stocks the NPC Hook left behind so that it doesn't all go bad.
• Rats SMP: The rat protagonists live their lives scurrying through the walls, pipes, and corners of the Big Fancy House in which they reside, hiding from humans and scavenging for resources for survival from unused chests.

Western Animation

• Beast Wars: Rattrap, being a Maximal who turns into a rat, falls under this trope. Though a Deadpan Snarker and often more concerned with his own well-being, he's clever enough to weasel his way out of traps, knows how to combat opponents (even much larger ones) effectively, knows traps like the back of his own hand, and can go through the occasional bout of deceit against the Predacons.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Gadget Hackwrench, a mouse, is the smartest member of the team as she's created all of the Rangers' vehicles and weapons out of garbage. The most notable example is the Ranger plane, which is a small dirigible made out of a bottle of bleach, a balloon, and plungers as landing gear.
• Duck Tales: Gadget Hackwrench makes an appearance and is given an origin story. She was experimented on and she received a procedure that enhanced her intelligence and she surprised the scientists by using tools. She used tools to make her own clothes, and she made the Ranger plane for her and her friends to use in order to escape the facility.
• Mickey Mouse: Mickey has always been depicted as resourceful and clever, from building his own airplane out of a Model T ("Plane Crazy") to making music with household objects and barnyard animals ("Steamboat Willie") to taking down a giant with just scissors, needle and thread ("Brave Little Tailor").
• Pinky and the Brain: The Brain is an evil genius who wants to take over the world with his plans and inventions.
• Speedy Gonzales: Speedy Gonzales is the fastest mouse in all of Mexico who outsmarts and humiliates his vastly stronger enemies to help his friends and outrun his enemies. It's the reason why he's so idolized in Mexico, he's a smooth-talking hero who always outsmarts others and always wins at the end of the story.
• Tom and Jerry: Jerry uses household items as tools and dollhouse parts as furniture. These items range from a tin can being used as a mailbox, to a spoon being used as an oar, and to a teacup being used as a boat. Jerry is famous for outsmarting and humiliating his frenemy Tom.

Real Life

• In this video, a mouse has shown organization skills by putting tools back in a box.
• In this video, a pair of rats learned how to use a hook and a rake to drag treats closer to them.
• In real life, rats have been known to infiltrate houses by walking across clotheslines and by swimming through toilets.
• Anyone who has ever struggled in vain to prevent squirrels from raiding their birdfeeders will know how devious and innovative such rodents can be, when there's a barrier between them and food. Some people even build whole obstacle courses to test the squirrels' ability to navigate them.
• Invoked by UFC fighter Demetrious "Mighty Mouse" Johnson, a former UFC Flyweight Champion known for his quick strikes and elusive movement. He's also quite small, standing at a height of 5 foot 3 inches.
• Pack rats are known to be resourceful creatures as they are known to build nests from plant materials and debris. They are also known to steal from humans and "trade" for items that they find more interesting.
• In this video a rat was actually caught on camera stealing a necklace from a jewelry store in India. It's believed that the rat might not actually be feral and may have been trained by someone to steal the necklace.

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