Ethology

I absolutely adore animals, although I only have 2 pets myself, a gerbil and a cat. Salisbury Steak and Sprite Stenzel, respectively, although they are not named after food. Sprite was a stray we picked up while moving to our new house (when I was 5 or so), named for her elusive nature: a sprite being either 1) a small or elusive supernatural being, or 2) a large, dim, red flash that appears above active thunderstorms in conjunction with lightning. She was aptly named for eluding the disasters that befell every other cat in the Stenzel household. The last of her kind...

Salisbury Steak is another story. I had to purchase a subject to experiment on for an AP Biology ethology project. Ethology, as you may or may not know, is the scientific study of behavior in (living) organisms. Every year at our school the AP & IB Biology students have a major ethology project in late May / early June, as sort of a last hurrah after the major bio exam. In order to perform their experiments, they need some sort of living organism (obviously) that the school doesn't provide (obviously) and that they have to take care of once the experiment is done (obviously). They also have to keep their "subjects" in the school's science lab until the experiments are done, which I consider rather unfair to the poor li'l critters. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided to BS my project because I was lazy and had senioritis (going on 3 years). So I purchased a box of Dixie paper cups and decided to record what a hamster did with them. Probably the worst project in school history, with no set time frame or control groups or anything. What will a hamster do with cups? Ooh, how exciting! I dragged my parents out to Petsmart (the Pet Smart Pets Mart) and moseyed on over to the 'small rodent' cage to pick out some random hamster.

And there he was. Not a hamster, but a tiny little gerbil staring up at me with his puny paws up against the glass. "Take me home?" his big watery eyes begged, and I was helpless to refuse. Within mere seconds I was the owner of a baby bundle of panic and mayhem. But how was I to know his evil ways? He was just so adorable! So I took the little guy home, set him up in a fish tank (not full of water, I'm not that insane), and set on the impossible task of naming him.

Skip the migraines, trashed notebooks, and 8 days, I ended up picking Salisbury: the city 13 kilometers south of Stonehenge. Or the capitol of Zimbabwe. Either way worked, really. I bring him to class, excited and proud to have picked out such an exotic name. My friend Jeff asks what his name is. "Salisbury!" I declare proudly.

"Oh, you mean like the steak?"

And suddenly my whole world crumbled. Everyone I showed Sal off to asked the same thing, over and over. And no matter how much I denied it, there was no shaking that extra "Steak" from his name. So now I had a gerbil not named after a mystical and mysterious construction of giant stones, or the exotic capitol of a far off land, but a common food item. Crap.

My only option was to twist the words around: 'Salisbury Steak' became 'Salisbury is not a Steak', then 'Salisbury likes to eat Steak', and my favorite, 'Salisbury would totally win in a fight against Steak'. Finally a name set: 'Salisbury, not like the Steak'. Despite this small victory over his oppressors, 'not like the' slowly diminished away until just 'Salisbury Steak' was left. And, well, it stuck.

So there you have it: the story of how my gerbil got his name. The actual ethology project is a whole other (incredibly long and painful) story altogether...maybe that will be related later on.