History Main / CaligulasHorse

** A cat named [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubbs_(cat) Stubbs]] in Talkeetna, Alaska was mayor from 1997 until his death in July 2017.

* The satirical Rhinoceros Party of Canada, inspired in part by the Cacareco incident, was nominally led by a rhinoceros known as Cornelius the First, who lived at the Granby Zoo in Granby, Quebec.

-->'''Gilbert''': What year is it?
-->'''Holtzmann''': It's 2040! Our president is a plant!

** In "C.E.D'oh", Burns reveals the nuclear plant is actually owned by a canary, so that if the government ever conducts a proper investigation, [[PromotedToScapegoat the canary is the one that will go to jail]]. Mr. Burns implies that this is standard practice, saying "Standard Oil was once owned by a half-eaten lunch." Homer is shown at the very bottom of the nuclear plant's employee hierarchy via a chart (the canary being at top, with Burns directly below him). Directly above Homer is the Inanimate Carbon Rod.

** In the episode "The Last Temptation of Homer Simpson", it was shown that he had, aside from hiring an illegal Iranian immigrant worker, also had hired a duck named "Stewart" as a low level employee who tows nuclear waste. (He also berates it to "get back to work!" when it briefly stops to catch it's breath) This may be less outright insanity and more Mr. Burns' cheapness combined with a callous disregard for life. Later in the episode Burns is scanning the security monitors trying to find a pair of employees who are ''not'' currently fighting with each other to send as his representatives to a convention, not only is the duck seen fighting another employee, he's ''winning''.

*** Yet another episode had most of the Springfield Republican Party mistakenly assume the mayoral candidate they've chosen to back was a water cooler. They seemed to think it would make a fine representative.

* In 1958, a female rhinoceros named Cacareco was elected on to the city council of UsefulNotes/SaoPaulo, Brazil. In this case, ''100 000 people'' had voted for her to embarrass ridicule the city's corrupt and inefficient city government. While Cacareco was ultimately disqualified from serving by city officials, the term "Cacareco vote" is used in Brazil to this day as a term for votes of protest to express dissatisfaction with the available candidates in an election.
** The satirical Rhinoceros Party of Canada, inspired in part by the Cacareco incident, was nominally led by a rhinoceros known as Cornelius the First, who lived at the Granby Zoo in Granby, Quebec.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_%28cat%29 Tama the cat]] was a station master in Japan from 2007 until her death in 2015. The stations on the Kishigawa Line had all been destaffed as a cost-cutting measure, with station masters being selected from local business owners. Tama was selected from a number of cats being cared for by passengers and Kishi Station's manager, Toshiko Koyama. She had several cat assistants and a deputy, Nitama, who took up the role of station master after Tama's death.
** Notably, the primary duty of the station master was to greet passengers - something that a cat could actually be quite good at (allowing for a lack of speech or even awareness of the position), making this particular example surprisingly adept at her job.

* ''ComicBook/TheSimpsons:'' Given a nod during a re-enactment of ''Threatre/JuliusCaesar''. Caligula (Homer) comments that Caesar (Mr. Burns) is insane, not to Moe, but to the horse next to him.

[[quoteright:200:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/s_Horse_112.JPG]]

* In BusinessCat the titular character appoints [[spoiler:his mouse toy] to multiple positions in the company.

** There is also the (in-universe) historical example of St Ossory's ass (his donkey, not his behind) which was made a bishop in the Omnian church.[[note]]The parellel in TheBible is the tale of Balaam's ass, who developed enough sentience to rebuke the prophet Balaam for not doing God's will.[[/note]]

* In ''VideoGame/CrusaderKings II'', if your character has the Lunatic trait, you can get a random event where you decide to appoint your horse as your chancellor. Previously, this just dismissed the current chancellor and left the position vacant, but a recent patch makes the event generate an actual horse character named Glitterhoof to fill the position. Naturally, someone took it to the [[UpToEleven logical extreme]] and used an [[GoodBadBug exploit]] in order to [[https://imgur.com/a/K1utf make a horse the ruler of the restored Roman Empire]].

* This is revealed to be the reason that names in the ''FanFic/OversaturatedWorld'' are similar to their Equestrian counterparts. At one point, a king appointed his horse Glitterhoof as his successor, and the nobles agreed that the horse was a better option then the king's sons. Combined with some clever proxy ruling and surprisingly good luck, the horse-led nation conquered most of europe in a few generations, and people began using horse puns in their language as a result; the kingdom later collapsed, but the naming convention stuck around.
** And apparently this was based on a particular Crusader Kings playthrough.

* In ''VideoGame/CrusaderKings II'', if your character has the Lunatic trait, you can get a random event where you decide to appoint your horse as your chancellor. Previously, this just dismissed the current chancellor and left the position vacant, but a recent patch makes the event generate an actual horse character to fill the position. Naturally, someone took it to the [[UpToEleven logical extreme]] and used an [[GoodBadBug exploit]] in order to [[https://imgur.com/a/K1utf make a horse the ruler of the restored Roman Empire]].

* In BusinessCat the tititular character appoints [[spoiler:his mouse toy] to multiple positions in the company.

* [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] in ''{{Film/Ghostbusters2016}}'' when Gilbert has reason to believe she and Yates have traveled to the future.

* Non-villainous example: In ''Anime/YuGiOhGX'', after Daitokuji Sensei's death, his cat Pharaoh becomes the ''de facto'' headmaster of the Osiris dorm. (It's likely they couldn't find a teacher who wanted the position, as the Osiris dorm was traditionally for failing students and those expected to fail, the only ones willingly rooming there were those allied with Judai and those protesting the school#s policies for some reason, two factors which were often exclusive. Not that running the dorm was a big job; by season three, the number of official Osiris students started to dwindle until Judai - who had earlier turned a promotion down - was the only one left.)

* The [[BritishUnis University of East Anglia, Norwich]] once elected a gerbil as its Student Union President. This was meant as a sarcastic backlash against the moribund, party-driven nature of student politics - perceived as irrelevant to the interests of the student body - and the supine nature of the university's politically-minded students. Students alienated by the partisan nature of the game and the way some candidates viewed the position not as one of genuine service, but merely as a tick on their CV's for political careers elsewhere, made a telling point. [[note]]Several UEA students active in university politics at this time did indeed go on to become MP's, MEP's or else very active "fixers" in their respective party organisations. Or party hacks, depending on your point of view.[[/note]]

** A cat named Stubbs in Talkeetna, Alaska has been mayor since 1997.

* TropeNamer: Emperor UsefulNotes/{{Caligula}} famously planned to appoint his favorite horse Incitatus to the consulship, the (by this point purely titular) highest political office in Rome. However, it's a little more complicated than it sounds: he may have done this in order to mock the Senate ("My horse could do as good a job as any of you clowns! I'll just teach him to stamp once for 'yes' and twice for 'no comment'"), it may have been a rumor started after his death, he could just have wanted the year to be named after Incitatus (the first consuls of the year were eponymous), or he genuinely might have been completely insane (this was the firm position of most ancient writers.)
** Mind you, most Roman historians were of the Senatorial class. If Caligula was deliberately and clearly insulting the Senate, they might have taken their revenge in the history books.

* TropeNamer: Emperor UsefulNotes/{{Caligula}} famously planned to appoint his favorite horse Incitatus to the consulship, the (by this point purely titular) highest political office in Rome. However, it's a little more complicated than it sounds: he may have done this in order to mock the Senate ("My horse could do as good a job as any of you clowns! I'll just teach him to stamp once for 'yes' and twice for 'no comment'"), it may have been a rumor started after his death, or he genuinely might have been completely insane (this was the firm position of most ancient writers.)

[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
* The movie ''Disney/TheAristocats'' has a Paris woman deciding to allow the Cats to inherit her estate, with her butler intending to off the cats before she dies so he could acquire the inheritance. And, ironically enough, that turned out to be completely pointless: if he had listened to the ''whole'' will, he would've heard that upon the Paris woman's death, the butler was to be ''appointed the cats' caretaker'', so he actually would've (sort of) gotten the money ''anyway'' if he'd just left the cats alone.
[[/folder]]

* The [[BrtishUnis University of East Anglia, Norwich]] once elected a gerbil as its Student Union President. This was meant as a sarcastic backlash against the moribund, party-driven nature of student politics - perceived as irrelevant to the interests of the student body - and the supine nature of the university's politically-minded students. Students alienated by the partisan nature of the game and the way some candidates viewed the position not as genuine service, but as a tick on their CV's for political careers elsewhere, made a telling point. [[note]]Several UEA students active in university politics at this time did indeed go on to become MP's, MEP's or else very active "fixers" in their respective party organisations. Or party hacks, depending on your point of view.[[/note]]

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', the nuclear plant is actually owned by a canary, so that if the government ever conducts a proper investigation, the canary is the one that will go to jail. Mr. Burns implies that this is standard practice, saying "Standard Oil was once owned by a half-eaten lunch." In another episode, he made a dog a vice president.
** In another episode, an inanimate carbon rod from the nuclear reactor was honored as Employee of the Month (much to Homer's chagrin), and [[spoiler: after Homer accidentally "used" a different Inanimate Carbon Rod to lock the door on the spacecraft after he broke it]], it was given its own ticker-tape parade.
*** In fact, in the aforementioned episode with the canary, Homer is shown at the very bottom of the nuclear plant's employee hierarchy via a chart (the canary being at top, with Burns directly below him). Directly above Homer is the Inanimate Carbon Rod.
*** Its also implied that hiring animals to even work at the plant, never mind making them high officials, was one of Mr. Burns' quirks, as in the episode "The Last Temptation of Homer Simpson", it was shown that he had, aside from hiring an illegal Iranian immigrant worker, also had hired a duck named "Stewart" as a low level employee who tows nuclear waste. (He also berates it to "get back to work!" when it briefly stops to catch it's breath) This may be less outright insanity and more Mr. Burns' cheapness combined with a callous disregard for life. Later in the episode Burns is scanning the security monitors trying to find a pair of employees who are ''not'' currently fighting with each other to send as his representatives to a convention, not only is the duck seen fighting another employee, he's ''winning''.
*** In the episode with the flashback of Maggie's birth, Homer briefly quit his job. When he returned to the plant he found he had been replaced with a chicken. Which he later ate.

* Non-villainous example: In ''Anime/YuGiOhGX'', after Daitokuji Sensei's death, his cat Pharaoh becomes the ''de facto'' headmaster of the Osiris dorm. (It's likely they couldn't find a teacher who wanted the position, as the Osiris dorm was traditionally for failing students and those expected to fail, the only ones willingly rooming there those allied with Judai and those protesting the schools policies for some reason, two factors which were often exclusive. Not that running the dorm was a big job; by season three, the number of official Osiris students started to dwindle until Judai - who had earlier turned a promotion down - was the only one left.)