While attending San Diego State, I switched majors the way Imelda Marcos used to change shoes. I had actually started out as an Ag major at Cal Poly Pomona before getting homesick and dropping out freshman year.
When I restarted my college career at SDSU, I was undeclared for my first semester (a luxury few colleges allow any longer), then took astronomy as my major. I loved the big picture and planetary exploration parts of astronomy — still do — but could never wrap my head around calc. Still, when I joined Air Force ROTC, it was pointed out that the Air Force didn’t need any astronomers, and so I changed my major to aeronautical engineering. Oddly enough, calc didn’t get any easier with the new major.
While I was wrestling with that, I was still finishing out my general education requirements, which included freshman biology.
I can’t remember the professor’s name, but he dressed like a cowboy even though he had zero drawl when speaking. But he had a great presence at the front of the huge lecture hall, and made the subject interesting to the hundred or so of us taking the course.
To this day, I remember one story he shared with the class while we were studying infant imprinting in animals.
Some of his graduate students decided to test imprinting in chickens by mounting one of his cowboy boots on a motorized lazy susan in the campus hatchery. Sure enough, as the chicks hatched, not seeing a mama chicken anywhere, they took this moving cowboy boot as their mother and began following it around in circles.
As these chicks grew into hens and roosters, they apparently still identified as cowboy boots — although the professor had no idea this was going on.
One day, he found himself giving a tour of the hatchery to a contingent from the National Science Foundation who were visiting as part of the application process for a grant SDSU had applied for in biology.
As the professor led the NSF committee — highly esteemed biologists from some of the finest universities in the country — into the hatchery as part of the tour of the university’s overall biology program, one of the roosters saw his cowboy boots and fell in love.
The rooster began dancing in front of the boots to try to impress them — strutting this way and that. The professor, in telling the story, recalled thinking the behavior was a bit odd, but he was more focused on answering any questions the prestigious guests might have. It was a large, important grant the school had applied for, and he wanted to make a good impression.
While he was standing there fielding questions from this esteemed group of experts, the rooster decided that he’d surely impressed his would-be mate by now and mounted one of the boots to consummate their budding relationship. The more the professor shook his foot to try to get the rooster out of the way, the more aroused the rooster got.
He was shaking his boot, the rooster was flapping its wings and crowing and just going crazy. Finally, the excitement was too much for the rooster, and he finished his task before waddled off to take a nap.
My professor said as he was and his guests were staring in confusion and distaste at the rooster semen dripping off his boot, he looked to the door to the hatchery room and saw a group of his graduate students on the other side of window howling in laughter. Mortified, he looked back — only to find his NSF guests all trying — briefly — to control their own laughter before they gave in to the moment.
Whether he got the grant or not, I don’t remember.
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Great story. Made me smile
True or not, good story.