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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.
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.
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.
Everything I learned as a kid was later proven to be a myth, so what have I ever really known...?
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.)
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 :)
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.
I guess the 50s where different times
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.
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.
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.
Throwing them off cliff for the purpose of entertainment? Huge judgement. And kids would get seriously spanked if they did that.
The sensational Amiga puzzle video game called "Lemmings" helped perpetuate the idea, too. :)
Maybe if I tried to play it again I’d realise that it was my limited 10 year old mind after all!
>"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."
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].
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)
I guess they were the analog version of TikTok.
(Edit: appears they were called "Magi-Cartridge": https://youtu.be/tEshEHC78no?si=SaJk9aLkNUJpm-XK)
The difference between what's allowed for popular media and what research professionals would accept is pretty wide.
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.
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females....
http://duckcomicsrevue.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-lemming-with...
Remember reading this one as a kid.
> 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.
https://www.goloudnow.com/podcasts/no-such-thing-as-a-fish-1...
>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]
Little gangs of lemmings throwing other lemmings into the sea.
That would rule. Disney would be proud.
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.
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.
Coincidentally, it also features the very lemming story that brought us here.
If they want to stay in business, they have to deliver a product.
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.
It looks very convincing to me if it is a fake.
"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...
