Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior
adfg.alaska.govThe scene may have been staged, but Wiki's entry on them suggests the demonstrated behavior is completely authentic, instead taking a more semantic argument about the term suicide:
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"Lemmings have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs. It is not a deliberate mass suicide, in which animals voluntarily choose to die, but rather a result of their migratory behavior. Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. They can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many drown if the body of water is an ocean or is so wide as to exceed their physical capabilities. Thus, the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings, and perhaps a small amount of semantic confusion (suicide not being limited to voluntary deliberation, but also the result of foolishness), helped give rise to the popular stereotype of the suicidal lemmings, particularly after this behaviour was staged in the Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958.[12] The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at least the late 19th century. In the August 1877 issue of Popular Science Monthly, apparently suicidal lemmings are presumed to be swimming the Atlantic Ocean in search of the submerged continent of Lemuria.[13]"
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The Disney Film narrated the event (from the article) as, "A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny. That destiny is to jump into the ocean. As they approach the sea, they've become victims of an obsession -- a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!"
That does not seem especially inaccurate.
Yeah, I was thinking that too.
I guess Disney's real offense was picking the wrong subspecies of lemming (one that absolutely doesn't have this behavior) and forcibly dropping them off a cliff because the little creatures wouldn't play along otherwise. Pretty nasty.
> the demonstrated behavior is completely authentic
But Attempting to cross a body of water is quite a bit different than plunging off a cliff. A rather low-to-the-ground animal has limited information about the width/risk of a water obstacle, but they do know what happens if they walk off a cliff. That's something they encounter in the course of normal daily behaviours required to provision fitness. Faking the cliffwalk because attempting to cross oceans exists is more than a semantic argument.
IIRC herds of buffalo would fall off of cliffs because you can't see the cliff ahead of you when you're face-to-ass with the beast in front of you.
Everything I learned as a kid was later proven to be a myth, so what have I ever really known...?
Pretty much the entire second half of the article addresses this directly.
Or find a way to watch that segment of the documentary. Those few lines of the narration don't really capture the narrative of the visual story-telling. (Though it was somewhat sickening to watch even before we knew the filmmakers were torturing and killing the lemmings rather than just observing them.)
I was hiking a summer when there was a 'lemming year'. You saw thousands of tiny carcasses strewn everywhere during that week, you accidently stepped on them as they ran under your hiking boots mid-step, if you sat down off trail they would start running up to you and attack. It was very surreal, they are very cute but also very fierce. Seeing a lemming run up to you and stand up on its hind legs and produce a high pitched shriek to intimidate you is something I'll never forget. Very strange animals.
The comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109510 has very similar content and is a few hours older than this one. Did you post the same thing under two usernames or something?
I didn't see it, but everyone who has hiked during a lemming year has these types of stories about these crazy animals
Edit: I read the comment you linked, the reason we have such similar language is because Swedes and Norwegians call it the same thing and I guess both of us were unsure if 'lemming year' is a widespread term :)
Belgian actually, but with Norwegian friends. :)
Here's another Scandinavian.. those "lemming years" as we called them used to be fairly common in the past, much more then than these days. They used to happen regularly every four years or so. I remember the summer of 1974 (I think it was), the roads were so slick with lemming carcasses that every early morning road maintenance crews would be out with machinery normally used for building/maintaining roads - I think the English term is "road grader". Roads were completely covered with blood and innards from lemmings. It was surreal.
I think the English term is "road grader"
Yup, these things:
https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/motor-grade...
Now, maybe you're thinking of something else, but a road grader would definitely do that grizzly job.
That's what they used, yes.
The writing styles seem sufficiently different to me. Also the accounts were both made years ago and years apart.
A much more likely and charitable interpretation of events is that 'lemming year' is an event that many people have experienced and the experience is sufficiently similar that you get accounts that sound the same.
I mean, if multiple people described christmas morning to me, my first thought wouldn't be that they're all in actuality the same person.
They really aren’t similar at all. Can you not be a Reddit and go around looking for things to accuse people of? Thanks.
I remember walking the Norwegian mountain trails in late summer in a 'lemming year'. The lemming population explosion is so ridiculous you had to constantly look at your feet to avoid stepping on them, both live ones that sometimes puff their chests and make a big scene, as well as corpses littered all over the path.
Sounds fascinating. Got any videos of this phenomenon for us to visualize the scene?
> The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers.
I guess the 50s where different times
In westerns they would tie cables to horses' legs at the right length so that they would fall in the right place as if they had been shot.
Yep the infamous “Running W” stunt. Tarantino’s talked about that quite a bit.
Obviously the horse breaks its leg and then has to be put down. Pretty vile.
So every take they’d end up killing a horse.
I was interested and based on this https://truewestmagazine.com/animal-cruelty-in-movies/ It seems that it wouldn't cripple a horse when "done right". Problem is that it seems a lot of stunt unit director didn't do it right.
Interesting aside about Errol Flynn raising the issue of animal cruelty.
> So every take they’d end up killing a horse.
Horrible, but maybe not as expensive as it sounds, cgi of similar quality costs much more than a horse.
I don’t think people are expressing incredulity at the expense here!
I know. And I think it is interesting to look at how much that costs compared to what we do today. It surprised me that animals aren't that expensive, I would have guessed that killing horses would be way more expensive.
Expensive horses take expensive breeding, training, and maintenance. You can get a good draft horse (one bred for real work) for not much. And "hobby horse" isn't just a fun phrase.
I just recently learned what a ‘hobby horse’ means (in the terms of a “fun phrase” as you say). So I’m dying laughing right now lol
Horses used to be plenty, then automobiles pushed them out of their role in the order of things. They're the OG victim of automation at a species level. I imagine at the time they were making those movies, there was still a huge overpopulation of horses relative to the use humans had for them, so you know... supply and demand.
Not even close, a horse costs as much as a car.
No it doesn't, it costs a few thousand dollars. Even if you killed a horse every minute in an hour long episode it would just be in the six figures, which isn't much for special effects heavy tv-show today.
A racing pure-blood sure, but an average horse goes for a couple thousands dollars at most.
An average used car costs a couple thousand dollars too.
Not different times, they're still at it
Yeah, you learn quickly in film school that documentaries edit footage however they like to tell a narrative. A lot of the incidents they describe happening in the wild are just multiple different situations clipped together, if you pay attention you'll notice some clips aren't even in the same place. There's even rumors recent footage of panicked animals were actually being caused by film crew drones, not anything happening naturally in the wild.
I think the "different times" was referring more to the animal cruelty than the choice to stage a scene.
Not so different times:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/animals-...
Or edit a scene together in the studio.
My pet hate regarding this docudrama where stuff that is just made up is mixed with real things and there is no way a viewer can tell the different.
Not new of course, has always happened even in books - e.g. the "people told Columbus the world was flat" myth was made up to spice up a biography.
I find it delicious that it was a Disney filmmaker who bought the lemmings off kids and let them run into the river (luckily they can swim).
The article mentions that, "If they get wet to the skin, they 're essentially dead." Reading the Wiki on them, they're quite a bizarre little species in countless ways. Highly recommended. [1]
Maybe I'm wrong but I read that to mean that if they get completely soaked in extreme winter weather, they'll die. This doesn't seem so bizarre. Some animals, both mammals and birds, have some protection against this because their hair/feathers are both greasy and help them keep "air cushions" that prevent water from completely soaking the body -- but if that ever happens in cold weather the animal is as good as dead, since it'll die of hypothermia before it gets dry.
I may be wrong though.
Yes, they can swim well and they have thick fur, I don't think jumping into a lake is inherently suicidal for them.
They are, however, in lemming years, not very afraid of predators and will even stand up and squeak furiously at you if you get close. I knew of a dog who would walk up to them, watch their tantrum display with interest, and then just chomp them up.
I think maybe that's where the "suicidal" idea comes from.
> stand up and squeak furiously at you if you get close
Looks like this, no fear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAMMicsN9A4
Amazing! Too big for his britches!
Animals used to the winter survives being wet, at least large ones like moose, they fall through the ice from time to time and people help them up. Maybe lemmings are so small that it wasn't worth evolving it, but it seems like a big handicap since most animals needs to drink regularly even in the winter.
Large ones have more heat reserve due to square-cube law: surface area increases less with volume.
Yeah, I think what I said applies to small animals like birds and rodents, creatures without large fat reserves.
City boy or girl? Me too, but I had some relatives with a farm, and some (quite a few, it would seem) farmers see animals as property and you can do to them whatever you want. If you need to cut their tail or their testicles for profit, you do it. Kill them? Sure. Put kittens in a bag with a few stones and throw them in a pond? Of course.
And that's not looking at the industrial scale at which animals are mutilated for food. Throwing a few lemmings over a cliff is insignificant.
I'm not sure where you are that "wild animals on my land are my property" is a popular sentiment, but it's certainly not in my neck of the woods.
Farmers here absolutely kill dangerous and nuisance animals, but it's because they are dangerous and/or pests. They also commonly hunt, both for resources and for sport. But it's definitely not acceptable to drown kittens. Anyone doing that here would be rightfully treated as a monster, regardless how rural your upbringing.
Dunno about them, but you don't have to look far in America.
Story from Georgia: I was a contractor working in a creepy old rural courthouse overnight. In the early hours of the morning, I kept seeing shadows in my periphery and thought I was hallucinating. Turned out to be a baby bat trapped in the room.
I spent the next few hours chasing it around trying to trap it with a wastebin. Eventually succeeded, called my boss and they called Animal Control. They were too busy to come out but said they'd "send someone." I stuck around and worked a double so nobody accidentally released it again; the day staff were all older ladies and it would have been pandemonium.
6 hours later, two facility maintenance workers from the city show up. I show them where it is, they say thanks and get in position around it. They proceeded to kick the can over and stomp it to death.
(That being my experience with "Animal Control" to date, I later caught a lost dog in rural California. This time, I just called the police, but they referred me to the Humane Society. Here we go again...except they showed up within an hour and collected him without incident.)
So, my older relatives with farm did actually took issue with useless animal cruelty. Killing it for food or something else necessary? Sure.
Throwing them off cliff for the purpose of entertainment? Huge judgement. And kids would get seriously spanked if they did that.
Your relatives are the abhorrent ones, not farm owners in general.
I was with you on the first and second on, food and population control - sure. But murdering kittens for no apparent reason?
The apparent reason is that you don't want to be saddled with their care and wish to be rid of them.
That is population control. Not the same as doing it because you want cool video.
Nothing justifies murdering kittens. Not even Doom music.
"Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth, but it's remarkable how many people believe it."
The sensational Amiga puzzle video game called "Lemmings" helped perpetuate the idea, too. :)
One good thing that came out of this myth, at least. That game is awesome.
The phrase of calling uncritical thinkers “lemmings” also helps entrench the idea
doesn't that come from the video game?
No, it comes from the myth and predates the video game.
The only reason why I know about lemmings is this game, had no idea this was based on actual animals called lemmings.
I’m convinced that some of the levels were deliberately unsolvable… get from one side of the screen to the other over a big chasm but you’ve got one exploding guy and one brick laying guy.
Maybe if I tried to play it again I’d realise that it was my limited 10 year old mind after all!
All the levels are solvable - the trick is many are solvable with losing zero lemmings, even though it seems you must lose at least one.
Most important tricks: blocker is released when terrain below it is removed, builder that hits terrain reverses direction, and multiple builders in a row can make staircase thick enough to be impassable from the other side.
Never seen the game, but I love the terminology.
The terminology is that the brick laying guy is a "builder" and the exploding guy is not actually a job - you're just killing him. (Then "exploder" is a job in Lemmings 2.)
You can see the manual here: http://www.abandonia.com/files/extras/28074_Manual.pdf (jobs are on page 17)
In Lemmings 2 it was an important mechanic that blockers would stop blocking if you removed the ground underneath them, since by doing that you'd get credit for saving them instead of killing them. It tended to defeat the concept of the blocker, but I suspect the same was true in the original.
But in the game the lemmings don't commit mass suicide, at least if the player is any good. Worst case, some lemmings are left behind for the common cause.
You can persuade the little tykes to blow themselves up pretty easily though.
They say its a Myth, but then
>"What people see is essentially mass dispersal," said zoologist Gordon Jarrell, an expert in small mammals with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "Sometimes it's pretty directional. The classic example is in the Scandinavian mountains, where (lemmings) have been dramatically observed. They will come to a body of water and be temporarily stopped, and eventually they'll build up along the shore so dense and they will swim across. If they get wet to the skin, they 're essentially dead."
That sounds like what wilderbeest do before crossing crocodile-infested waters. It's not suicide, they're just trying to get to other side and have no other options.
Pretty weird to see a "debunking" of "bogus behavior" followed up with descriptions of actual behavior that's pretty dang close to my impression of what they did. I never heard of it or thought of it as suicide.
It does sound like the Disney film, which almost none of the readers will have seen but a clip from, was totally fake and vile and was in fact bogus behavior in that it also wasn't even the right type of lemming. Everything about that sucks.
But it also kinda sucks that most of the article misled me; it wasn't until the description at the end and then reading the wikipedia and accounts here that I reverted back to somewhere near the initial impression I had.
Maybe I'm the weird one, and the popular idea really is about intentional suicide. But I always thought the popular idea was that sometimes large groups of them follow each other to their doom.
I mean, I appreciate the added nuance that 1) they were probably gonna die if they stayed where they were to begin with, there's just too many of them and 2) it's more commonly a very deadly trek, not literally the whole group dying at once, though it sounds like that does happen sometimes [and I only ever had the impression that it happens sometimes].
congratulations to whomever amongst you who capitalized on this and initially created the Lemmings game for the Amiga
I mean, it was Russell Kay[0], David Jones[1] and Mike Dailly[2], though I don't know if they're here.
Personally I enjoyed the Lemmings Revolution game in the series, and that was much later than the Amiga version.
[0] - https://www.mobygames.com/person/685/russell-kay/
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jones_(video_game_develo...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dailly_(game_designer)
Lemmings was a huge hit on any platform it was released on. I think I played it on the Mac at the time.
And it has so many clones! I played at least 10 when I was younger with different animals or popular characters, same mechanics of having to save them before they die.
Saw this oddity on a wild film-loop projector when I was in Junior high school. If anyone remember's these (I remember them from the 1970's) they were the film equivalent of the 8-track tapeL: an endless loop of 8mm film (probably only 50 feet or so of film) in an odd chunky cartridge that you slammed into a small projector.
I guess they were the analog version of TikTok.
(Edit: appears they were called "Magi-Cartridge": https://youtu.be/tEshEHC78no?si=SaJk9aLkNUJpm-XK)
When I was studying documentary methods in media studies, this was widely shared. There were (and are) many things calling themselves documentaries but are closer to entertaining simulations.
The difference between what's allowed for popular media and what research professionals would accept is pretty wide.
Disney is an extreme offender here (I mean, dropping lemmings off a cliff, what where they thinking?), but I hear some of what we "know" about animals is sometimes an honest mistake and may be the result of an involuntary artifacts of researcher involvement.
Don't know if it's true, but a couple of examples I've read:
It's not true that wolves live in "packs" and that there are alpha and beta males. In truth wolves form families of the breeding couple and their cubs, and that's it. Saying daddy and mommy wolf are the "alphas" is a trivial assertion. But apparently this dynamic is broken for wolves in captivity, and the artificial alpha/beta thing arises.
Female praying mantises do not regularly chomp on the male's head while mating. It's true they are highly cannibalistic and will eat another mantis if they can, but while mating the males usually have tactics to avoid this fate; it's only under observation by researchers that the female gets more aggressive and the male less prone to escaping.
Not sure if either is true, but I'm willing to entertain the notion they may be.
Yes, the Alpha Wolf myth appears to be a very damaging slice of b.s.
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females....
What is very damaging about it? Beyond facilitating A/B/O fan fiction, of course.
That people (usually males) believe this fanfiction also applies to human society and change their behaviours to be perceived as alpha
I don’t think many people would base their behaviour off wolves, parrots, gudgeons, mollusks or whatnot. That’s such a random species to choose.
If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied wolves didn’t question external validity of their studies on captive wolves.
The wolf is not a random animal. It's a big predator associated in popular culture with aggression and dominance, e.g "a wolf in sheep's clothes", "the wolf of wall street", etc.
Both of those describe deceivers (though the latter may not originally have), not aggressors or dominators.
Given humanity’s long history of antagonism towards wolves, it is a very strange animal after which to choose to model one’s own behavior.
It even made it into a Donald Duck comic, "The Lemming with the Locket":
http://duckcomicsrevue.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-lemming-with...
Remember reading this one as a kid.
I've always suspected that the myth is due to the Bible. Mark 5:11-13
> Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.
As noted, migrating lemmings will congregate at the edge of a cliff where some unfortunate clumsy ones will fall off. Someone seeing this would surely be reminded of the Bible passage and be tempted to imagine the creatures had been driven to suicide by demons.
TIL that lemmings are a real animal
As a child, I saw the Disney documentary numerous times (reruns on Sunday nights; there were only 3 TV channels). I believed the story into adulthood, having no reason to believe that Disney would fake a nature documentary.
If you want to listen to a fun podcast that gets into this:
https://www.goloudnow.com/podcasts/no-such-thing-as-a-fish-1...
I love nature documentaries so much! They are beautiful, entertaining, and informative. But this makes me wonder how many other ideas have they have mislead me on? Do we need to worry about nature documentaries being a type of propaganda?
This reminds me when I found out the truth of a childhood movie of mine : Milo and Otis
Could you elaborate on that? From a superficial read on Wikipedia it appears the alleged abuses were denied by Japanese Humane Societies.
>The Adventures of Milo and Otis ... is a 1986 Japanese[2] adventure comedy-drama film about two animals, Milo (an orange tabby cat) and Otis (a pug).
>When the film was released, some animal welfare organizations alleged to have had a number of complaints from people who had seen the film and were concerned that it could not have been made without cruelty.[19] The Tasmanian and Victorian branches of the RSPCA also alleged abuse.[20]
>The film was reported to have the approval of the American Humane Society.[19] The American Humane Association attempted to investigate cruelty rumors through "contacts in Europe who normally have information on movies throughout the world." While noting that the contacts had also heard the allegations, they were unable to verify them. The organization also reported, "We have tried through humane people in Japan, and through another Japanese producer to determine if these rumors are true, but everything has led to a dead end." The same report noted that several Japanese Humane Societies allowed their names to be used in connection with the film and that the film "shows no animals being injured or harmed."[4]
[Source: Wikipedia]
That's news to me! I'll see if I can find anything in Japanese. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Someone should make a Disney movie about homocidal lemmings next and see if we can get that to stick too.
Little gangs of lemmings throwing other lemmings into the sea.
That would rule. Disney would be proud.
If I were a writer for the next Squid Games, I'd be toying with this concept.
It remains common practice for nature "documentaries" to create fake narratives in editing. Pay attention to cuts, camera angles and changes in background scenery and you'll notice quite a lot of it. If they're showing two animals in some sort of confrontation but only ever show one of the animals at a time, you can be sure it's fake. If they're showing something that has several camera angles it's probably fake, particularly if some of the camera angles are very close or in a position that should make the cameraman visible in the other angles.
That popular video of a lizard running through a gauntlet of snakes is very fake. They probably spliced together many days of footage using captured lizards and snakes.
The audio in nature documentaries is all fake too, right? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard this from a reliable source, but at some point years ago I got the idea in my head and now every time I’m watching on I’m convinced the vast majority of the sound effects are fake.
I work in film. I’d have to assume so, since the cameras are often very far using long telephoto lenses.
Your definition of “fake” can be a lot of things as the team will record as much audio as they can of of the actual animal (I assume). But the final audio track is a bit like VFX in the visual side - you combine elements from all sources, your recordings, historical recordings, foley audio. Whatever it takes to get the desired effect in the audience.
I wonder. I tend to think so. But then I also think of things like the parabolic sideline microphones at football games and wonder how well they'd work with an amplifier.
Yep! There was an episode of 99 Percent Invisible focusing on the sound design fakery in nature documentaries: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sounds-natural/
Coincidentally, it also features the very lemming story that brought us here.
I remember taking to a film maker at Yellowstone. He told me that you have a fixed amount of time and budget to get footage. If you don’t get everything you need, you fill with some other footage. That footage may be from previous projects or bought from somebody else.
If they want to stay in business, they have to deliver a product.
Also keep in mind many documentaries film in what are essentially zoos (large animal sanctuaries). Sometimes this is revealed in the show, but other times you have no idea. They get shots out in the serangheti but then cut back to a close-up of a cheetah inside a sanctuary.
Obviously not every behaviour can be captured in one take exactly in the way that will make an interesting film documentary. This is not some revelation.
As long as the edited footage represents something that could plausibly (though maybe rarely) happen I see no issue.
Personally I am happy to sit through a "drier" documentary if it is well made. But Planet Earth and the like are greatest hits type documentaries, designed to show the exceptional events and behaviours.
I mean in an interview they’re claiming it’s real https://www.fastcompany.com/3068093/heres-the-story-behind-t...
It looks very convincing to me if it is a fake.
It's not fake as in CG or puppet snakes or a set or they dropped a bucket of snakes on an unsuspecting lizard, but video from different times spliced together to present a narrative that isn't what happened. Fake temporally at least. The producer has acknowledged this:
"Unfortunately lizards, snakes and iguanas aren’t good at 'takes'." She continued: "For continuity, it was better to crop the scenes together based off of the two cameras we had at the time to create the best possible scene."
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/pla...
Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory should be basic teaching at school.
I hold out hope that Marty Stouffer’s Wild America didn’t make liberal use of those shenanigans in his original series.
Nor Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
I think, generationally, we’ve reached a point where more people know this scene was staged than have actually seen it.