Cerebral ischemia has become a research focus in recent years. Within various animal models, gerbil has becoming the ideal cerebral-ischemia model because of its incomplete basilar artery rings. Gerbil model has many advantages in both unilateral and bilateral cerebral ischemia research. So it has a wide application to the research of cerebral pathological after ischemia, the injury mechanism of reperfusion, the innovation of anti-cerebral ischemia new drugs. The applications of animal model especially the gerbil model in the field of cerebral ischemia were reviewed in this paper.