Lemmings get a bad rap. Commonly considered mindless followers and suicidal vermin, lemmings are a far cry from popular perception. The truth is these little rodents are more independent and less bent on self-destruction than they are given credit for.
Lemmings are basically solitary creatures. They live in tundra regions throughout the Arctic and sub-Arctic, where they feed on moss, lichen, grass, and other plants. On the occasions where they do meet up, its usually for a quick one-night stand to try and pop out another litter of little lemmings.
Due to predation, variations in food supply, and a prodigious ability to reproduce, lemming populations can fluctuate wildly, changing from near extinction to massive overpopulation in just one year. It is at these times of overpopulation when the lemmings embark on their legendary mass migrations. When there is little food left to be had and many competitors, lemmings, like most starving creatures, look for greener pastures. Large numbers of lemmings may disperse over wide areas, sometimes even braving bodies of water to reach new feeding grounds. In the course of swimming across various lakes and streams some lemmings often drown. Of course, this is also true of caribou, wildebeests, and just about any land animal that migrates across water.
The myth of mass suicide is an old one. The earliest published account I was able to track down puts the date at 1923, but the myth is probably much older. Considering that in the 1530s a hypothesis was put forward that lemmings fell from storm clouds and died out when spring came, the comparatively simple (and still believed) suicide myth probably also has a long pedigree.
In the 1950s the lemming suicide myth got a big double-boost due to Disney. In March, 1955, Disney published an issue of their comicbook Uncle Scrooge titled “The Lemming with the Locket” which featured a giant swarm of lemmings on an unstoppable quest to throw themselves into the sea. You can view the lemmings’ final moments here or read the whole comic here.
The lemming myth got an even bigger boost in 1958, when Disney released White Wilderness a supposed documentary about life in the Arctic. This film was successful enough to win an Academy Award for best documentary feature. Little did the Academy know that the documentary featured falsified footage¹, including its famous scene of lemmings jumping into the sea. The scene was filmed using creative editing and camera angles as well as outright fraud to create a scene of lemming suicide. It was filmed in southern Alberta, near Calgary, well south of the lemming’s natural habitat. The lemmings, which were captured by children, were flown from in from Churchill, Manitoba, for the shooting. In the footage (at the top of this entry) the film crew never shows more than maybe two dozen lemmings at a time. When it came to filming the lemmings jumping over the cliffs edge, that was just the film crew flinging the hapless rodents to their doom.
But while there’s no evidence that lemmings commit mass suicide, there are two documented cases of sheep doing just that. Sort of.
In 2002, 403 sheep flung themselves to their death in southern France. These sheep were likely trying to escape a pack of wolves and because they are herd (or in this case, flock) animals used to mindless following they all went over the cliff together.
In 2005, a like-minded group of sheep flung themselves from a cliff in Turkey. Nearly 1,500 sheep leapt from the cliff for no known reason, to the horror of the 26 families that owned the sheep. Their is a silver-lining, though. While over a thousand sheep leapt from the cliff, only about 450 died. By the time the later sheep went flying from the cliffs edge, the woolly bodies of their fallen comrades cushioned the blow enough that most of them survived.
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1. The film also featured the intentional hurtling of a polar bear cub over rocks. You can watch a lovely expose of all this here.
Another aside: the myth of lemming suicide helped spawned a successful series of video games, starting in 1991, entitled Lemmings.
More about the lemming suicide myth:
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/04/27/1081903.htm?site=science/greatmomentsinscience
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/cruelcamera/fakery.html
http://www.wildlifenews.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlife_news.view_article&articles_id=56&issue_id=6
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-lemming-jump.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/oct/31/internationalnews
http://advance.uconn.edu/2000/000612/00061214.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC1uhjku6ro&feature=related
More about sheep suicide:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/this-europe-shepherds-despair-as-wolf-packs-drive-sheep-to-suicide-649379.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2005-07-08-sheep-suicide_x.htm
Good description. I’ve come into contact with this revisionist interpretation before. My main question is, “Why would anyone believe that any of this was denied by the so-called mythmakers?” After all, selective filming is at least as old as nature documentaries. The statement that lemmings do not die even while migrating seems as specious, and as easy to falsify, as a statement that sheep do not fall or that foxes never enter henhouses. I suppose we should just say “natural causes” for the lemming deaths too? I mean, no one denies that cattle can drown. No one denies that gazelles are mortal too. So why do lemmings all of a sudden get the historical revisionist treatment? It resembles Holocaust denial, this unseemly haste to extinguish a simple truth.
Sometimes myths aren’t just myths because they are tales retold. Sometimes there actually is a reason for the myths. Now if you were going to say, “spinach itself is healthy but not as much as 1950s housewives thought,” you’d be making a point, not about the 1950s or about mothers in general, but about technology and the media’s influence on society. Yet somehow, when scientists observe the senseless deaths of lemmings, they’re creating “myths” that aren’t true? It’s very hard to take such a specious analysis seriously.
Oh, dear stranger, your specious analysis is hard to take seriously. The article you comment upon so verbosely never stated that lemmings don’t die in migration. In fact it explicitly says the opposite. It also states that the myths around lemmings contravene the observation of scientists. Science has shown that the common idea of lemming committing mass suicide is completely laughable, specious, if you prefer. It’s not exactly revisionism if you correct false opinion with real life fact, but whatevs.
Nice bizarre referencing of spinach. Does your Holocaust reference invoke Godwin’s Law?