Far too many hours devoted to this. We're talking days. This is the longest I've ever worked on any pic I've done to date, I've kinda been obsessed with it these last few days.

I loves me some Jerry Springer. And because Im such a fantard, many months ago I decided to do a parody of the Jerry Springer show using my rats.
My rats tend to bitch at each other over silly crap, and at the time I was attempting to introduce two adult bucks to one another, so drama and fighting was common place.

The white rat at the back is Nora, alpha of the girl's cage. She's by far the prettiest doe I have. She was used for breeding then came to live with me for retirement I was originally gonna do her pole dancing, kinda like the under-appreciated mother who has spent her whole life raising kids and looking after everyone else but now wants to just do what she wants. But I couldn't find a way to work it in.
The rat she's arguing with is Molly. Molly was my first rescue rat, and she's a little anti-social. She hates the bucks, seems to barely tolerate everyone else and likes to just be left alone. We always joke that she's a feminist just because of the way she goes insane if a buck even comes near her cage. If she were a person, she'd be a mouthy, opinionated scatty little bitch.

The big blue/grey rat is Grout. He's my young, up and coming alpha of the boy's cage. Absolutely stunning to look at, but has a definate attitude problem. Currently, he's trying to knock Josh (the big fat brown one) off the top spot and take over, so theres been a little scuffling between them. The rat in the middle playing the part of Steve is one of my past rats, Olly. He was fantastic. He hated violence, got along with everyone, never caused any problems. He was my little peace maker. He had a cage mate, an old white rat called Jerry (funnily enough, playing jerry springer in this pic) and Olly was DEVOTED to him. He'd put himself in front of him if there were any fights.
Olly died when a mystery infection hit my rat colony.
Jerry pined for him, and died a few weeks later
I miss Jerry so much, he was a great rat. But he just wouldn't live with anyone else. I tried getting him to live with some of my other bucks, but he attacked everyone and just didn't want to know. Guess he was just old and set in his ways. It was really sad. If Olly hadn't died, Im sure Jerry would probably still be here today :/

I wanted to work more rats into it, when I first planned it I wanted Juju and Jester in it too. But I have 9 rats now, so couldn't use them all.
Tried to do the set as close to the old-style Jerry Springer set as possible (that was the show at its peak), but since the show doesn't air in the UK right now (grrrr), I had to rely on what I could get from YouTube for reference.
Olly/Steve was based more on the Steve from the Jerry Springer Opera than real steve. I don't know why. Seemed to fit Olly's personality a little better.
Also, if you haven't seen the Jerry Springer opera, you MUST. Buy it, go see it live, just whatever you have to do. Its the best thing on earth.

*dies and is dead*