Pearls Before Swine Pearls Before Swine is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Stephan Pastis, formerly a lawyer in San Francisco, California. It chronicles the daily lives of four anthropomorphic animals, Pig, Rat, Zebra, Goat and the crocs. Although created in 1997, it was not published until 2000, when United Feature Syndicate ran it on its website. Its popularity rose after Dilbert creator Scott Adams, a fan of the strip, showed it to his own fans