Year: March, 2008
Tools: mouse, psp7, photoshop
Notes: This was submitted simply with the words 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'

Perhaps predictably, I got a little bit of flack for this picture. People seemed to misinterpret what I was trying to say. Many people found it blasphemous, but religion had very little to do with this picture.

When a laboratory rat is killed in the lab, it is sometimes referred to as a 'sacrifice' by the lab workers. That was what started this entire idea in my head. Then when you consider that lab rats prepped for dissection are done so by being pinned at the hands and feet to a wooden board, it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to come up with the above image.
People accused me of downplaying 'what Christ did for us' by putting something as trivial as a rat in his place. Evidently they expected me to respect their beliefs but weren't prepared to do the same for me by their constant implications that rats didn't actually matter this much.
To me, they do.
Rats matter as much to me as anyone's religion or god does to them.
Using the term sacrifice for this picture was a tongue in cheek gesture; of course it isn't a sacrifice, it’s a murder, a massacre, a killing in which the victim has no chance to defend itself, and all for the benefit of animal testing, which is a horribly outdated, inaccurate, dangerous form of science. It is as far from a sacrifice as you can get. And yet labs continue to use the term. I find it pathetically amusing.

And the reference wasn't only to lab rats, it just fitted better to use a white rat and laboratory style pins because of the above references. But really, it was as much a picture about the plight of rats in general as it was an anti-animal testing message. Rats are killed in huge numbers on a daily basis because people don't understand them. People think they're dirty, diseased, aggressive, worthy of nothing more than being hunted, trapped, poisoned and ripped to bits by dogs. Rats can legally be subjected to tortures and treatments that you'd get taken to court for if you bestowed on a cat or dog.
If you choose to believe the bible, Jesus was killed because people feared that which they didn't understand, when all he wanted to do was spread goodness. He meant no malice to anyone.
Rats mean no malice to anyone, and yet we continue to kill them in vast numbers, in our streets and in the labs, through nothing but our own ignorance.

Make of it what you will, but also know that as firm as you may be in your religious beliefs, I am just as firm in my beliefs against abuse of rats.