To be honest I don't remember how it started, I vaguely remember a poster who was handing out amateur psychological analysis and he acquired the "nick" of "Dr Will" and somebody made a remark about felching, Richard Gere and Gerbils on one of their posts talking about "Dr will" and like a reoccurring theme across mutiple monty python sketches, every so often comments about "Gerbils" appeared and the Gerbil thing took on a life of its own, with mutiple posters across all forums making references to Gerbils until the mods took offense and started threatening people with suspensions and bans if one referred to Gerbils or other rodents in posts