![]() Since White Wilderness, this erroneous misnomer has finagled its way into the present-day lexicon, including being referenced in a 2008 US Senate campaign ad, as well as a song by Blink-182. The survivers then swim deeper into the vast body of water, where the narrator speculates they will soon drown. ![]() See a clip of the film below.ĭuring the cliff-diving sequence, the pocket-sized creatures cascade into thin air, tumbling backward and flailing their Lilliputian limbs a la Mufasa in The Lion King, before they land with a distinctive splash in the Arctic Sea. #Lemmings jumping off cliffs ch movieThe staged suicide turned out to be a critical success, as the movie went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It turns out that there is no proof that an assemblage of wild lemmings would actually drive themselves off of a cliff at all, but rather the myth was perpetuated by a 1958 Disney documentary called White Wilderness, in which the filmmakers manually ran a pack of lemmings off of a cliff to make for good television. However, this does a disservice to these cuddly hamster-lookalikes. To refer to an individual as a lemming thus became synonymous with calling them a follower of a large group-a community on an unthinking course towards mass destruction. That was before the modern meaning gained traction: That populations tumbled because packs of lemmings would occasionally run head-first off of cliffs, plunging to their self-induced death for no apparent reason. Back in the 19th century, the Naturalist Edward Nelson wrote that 'the Norton Sound Eskimo have an odd superstition that the White Lemming lives in the land beyond the stars and that it sometimes comes down to the earth, descending in a spiral course during snow-storms.'" "In the 1530s, the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg, tried to explain these variations in populations by saying that lemmings fell out of the sky in stormy weather, and then suffered mass extinctions with the sprouting of the grasses of spring. For years, theories on these populace peaks and plummets varied from the supernatural to the absurd. ![]() Populations of lemmings fluctuate dramatically, from massive herds to near extinction. However, the long-lived myth actually has its roots in Hollywood trickery. That is, except for the lemming-a small, furry, gerbil-like rodent that has come to be defined by its alleged tendency to mindlessly kill itself by jumping off of cliffs. Perhaps because when your daily thought pattern is limited to eat-sleep-defecate, there's no time for existential exegesis or contemplating the futility of life. Just don’t tell me that Jimmy the Groundhog (I live in Wisconsin-sorry, Punxsutawney Phil!) can’t predict the arrival of spring.Animals are rarely known for their suicidal tendencies. Captured lemmings were placed on a turntable to simulate the migration and chased over a cliff into the sea.Īlthough we’d like to think we’re more sophisticated today and skeptical than we were a few decades ago, still many animal photographs, posters, videos and “documentaries” are staged. In the second video, you’ll see how similar film footage was created. In great part, it’s how the lemming-suicide myth began. Watch the first video segment below, from the 1958 Walt Disney documentary, White Wilderness, Part II. ![]() This ebb and flow in their numbers is the result of a mass migration, which may include jumping off of cliffs into the water and swimming great distances to the point of exhaustion-even death. The truth is that every three or four years in some regions, the lemming population drops to near extinction then skyrockets again. Many people today, influenced by films such as the early Walt Disney documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s, still believe that on the Arctic tundra, lemmings running to a cliff and flinging themselves off is one of those flukes of nature. #Lemmings jumping off cliffs ch tvThe top nature hoax-according to Animal Planet, the popular TV channel created by the BBC and Discovery Communications-is the suicidal nature of lemmings. A popular rumor about lemmings is that they commit mass suicide when they migrate, but the truth is much less dramatic. ![]()
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