After completing the Seal of the Department of Education, it was only natural to want to see what the seals of the other dozen departments. While it was obvious that I couldn't just sit down and draw them all (especially because I finished that first seal at a pizza stand), i did not know when I would be able to draw them if at all. My decision was to draw them as they were needed. The next seal I needed was the Seal of the Department of Human Relations.

This seal, apart from showing a lot of the conceptions the mice (and rats, since the rodent depicted is a rat) have about the humans, was commisioned of an artist that had never seen humans, except from pictures in books. Deliberately drawing a human badly to match how a character of yours would draw it is an interesting little experience, not to mention it gets you a lot of odd glances from the passers-by.

Initially, both were supposed to be wearing exactly the same clothes, but of course the human didn't look good barefoot, so the artist had to append socks, which he drew stretching up to the human's knees since they were the only socks the artist knew of. Next he had to take the human's flatcap away, since the design called for both to be at exactly the same height and the human was looking noticeably taller than the rat with the hat.

The decision to put buckles on the shoes comes from a rule the mice have when designing seals: all clothing must be contemporary to the time the mouse government was founded.

The Department of Human Relations was created to deal with the human government (or rather governments), and later with other species the mice encountered. The name would be retained for a century before being changed to "Department of Interspecies Relationships".