More on Rats

For whatever reason, I am still harping on rats. I started researching rats a little bit, as broadly as possible.

Here are some wikipedia articles that I thought were interesting as a starting point:
Fancy Rat
Model Organism
Laboratory Rat

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Rat Traps
I stumbled upon an absolutely horrific, heartbreaking video on youtube (which I refuse to link to here) that shows a rat caught in a sticky trap, choking on sticky glue and twitching as it tries in vain to free itself. That video actually makes me hate humans . . . and decide that people really are a bunch of bastards. I cant really understand how we can do things like that to other animals. I know I sound like a overly sentimental person or something, but I think the unnecessary torturous death of another living thing is objectively awful. And I'd like to see the rats get revenge. Its a nice idea anyway :)

I hate to post this one, but it makes me want to cry. I thought maybe it was a cartoony sort of image before I clicked on it, but once I realized how sad it was . . .

This leads me to following question: How can people kill rats when there are photos out there like this:

In all seriousness, though, what makes us feel like we can just kill them? Is it their size? What if they were the size of dogs and cats, how would we feel about it then? We have no problem killing insects, but the further up the food-chain we get (or rather the closer to mammals we get) the less comfortable we are with treating them as pests.

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Rat-baiting
Another thing that people do (or did anyway) with rats is throw them into a rat pit and have dogs (rat terriers, go figure, jack russels, etc.) try to kill as many as possible within a certain time frame. This is called rat baiting. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

1. Again, people are bastards
2. This is a connection to dogs in an unexpected way that I tend to forget about . . . the way dogs were often used for cruel things, not just to each other, such as pit-bull fighting, but towards other animals
3. People often make a big deal about laboratory animals being treated cruelly, but it seems to me that compared to the other ways rats can die (sticky trap, being smashed in a trap and left to suffocate, or perhaps having their necks wrung by dogs in a pit), lab-rat life is not so inhumane after all. I might revise my thoughts on that if I ever actually spent time in a laboratory setting. . . but. . .

maybe the glitter blood thing can go with the rat pit. . . or maybe not.

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Rats and Garbage in NYC
I also came upon an interesting video talking about rats in New York City. It was really interesting their relationship to garbage and waste - rat expert talks about how WE provide our waste garbage on the streets in NY and then of course there are tons of rats as a result.

Some thoughts on rats

• rats have so left the naimals kingdom and are now the property of science - when you think of rats its either garbage rats or genetically engineered things living in cages. I should make a really huge one. out of scale. really smart one?
• do the rats with all kinds of crazy electrodes on them maybe all connected with glitter. :) glitter red eyes? :) ha. Ok, enough with the glitter.

Excellent use of glitter

So here is a video that I first saw because it was directed by Richard Ayoade (of the IT Crowd, and Jesse Thorn posted it of course). I don't know much about music videos, but I actually really liked this one a lot. You can watch it here: Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I thought it was very artful. And what's more, there was excellent use of glitter. :) As we all know, good uses of glitter are few and far between, so I'm really pleased with the way the video uses confetti-type paper, glitter, etc. to evoke blood and guts without actually grossing people out with real blood and guts. :)

In case the video is taken down someday, I went to the trouble of taking a few screenshots of parts that I thought were kind of awesome and that also use glitter.

This makes me think - if glitter is meant to be cute and bright and fun, and they do a bang-up job of using it for something gross and unpleasant, perhaps I can utilize that structure in order to get some of that damn glitter into my own work. Hopefully as successfully and non-tacky as this video did.

Rats.

So . . . maybe all my life, or at least since I read the Rats of NIMH, I have been sort of enamored and delighted by rats. Admittedly, this is perhaps because I have grown up in the place where rats are part of a clean, scientific, laboratory environment, where they demonstrate their bright intelligence and resemblance to other adorable mammals such as dogs, and not in the place where the rats harbor diseases, run across your face while you are sleeping, and destroy your only food. I keep returning to the subject of rats as something I'd to use in my artwork, though my rationale is still hazy.

For one thing, rats are smart. I love that. They are pioneers - the first to test out practically every biologically-related study that we try. This may or may not be true, but it at least seems that way . . . that it is easy to associate rats with science and with being on the cutting edge of scientific advancement, whether or not we want them to be. I just recently came to the realization that the NIHM in "Rats of NIMH" stands for the National Institute of Mental Health, and that explains the whole premise of those books. This news, by the way, blew my mind and was the source of great thrill and excitement for several days.

There is, of course, the ethical issue of rats being kept in cages, running around in mazes, and being killed through painful or horrifying scientific testing.

Not sure just yet what I might want to do with this.