In their search for food, they have been seen swimming across lakes en masse, and some have been observed drowning, but this far from mass suicide or intentional cliff-jumping. Depending on climate, predators, and food, a lemming population can increase by ten-fold over the winter season. They sometimes make enormous migrations looking for new food sources. This results in lemmings running all over the place, crossing roads, jumping off cliffs, it sounds crazy, I know. That is when there is an abundance of lemmings in the wild. As the thaw of spring comes, all of these lemmings can find themselves above ground, and with too many mouths to feed. Every 4 years in Norway there is something we call lemming year. While winter rages on, these rodents travel and copulate under the snow, expanding their populations. Lemmings live in the tundra, where they build tunnels underground during long periods of snow. The “ocean” they jumped into was even just a river! The Canadian Broadcast Corporation even found that the lemmings were made to run on a snow-covered lazy-susan to make their numbers look larger for the film. What we don’t see-just off frame-are the filmmakers pushing the lemmings off the cliff. “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.”-narration from White Wilderness. In the film, they show hundreds of lemmings spilling off a cliff into the ocean to drown.
The film stages these lemmings in their march to death. Rumor has it that the Walt Disney company paid a dollar per lemming to Inuit hunters to provide the rodents. The filming of these Norwegian lemmings, for example, was done in Alberta, Canada. The film’s depiction of lemmings, however, was steeped in deception.
LEMMINGS JUMPING OFF CLIFFS GAME SERIES
Released in 1958, the film was part of a series of movies showing “true to life” depictions of animals in their natural environments. The lemming myth was popularized by none other than the Walt Disney Company in the Academy Award-winning nature documentary, White Wilderness. This idea of lemming behavior has become so prevalent that it’s fallen into popular jargon, where calling someone a lemming means they are unthinking and prone to join mass movements. Depending on who’s telling, they’re either too unyielding in their stubborn march in one direction to stop, or they just aren’t intelligent enough to know any better. They have a reputation for participating in massive migrations, where herds of the tiny critters mindlessly leap off of cliffs to their deaths.
Lemmings are hamster-sized rodents that live in the snowy Arctic. Today: Lemmings Jumping to Their Deaths Are Lemmings Cliff-Jumping Maniacs? Sorry to burst your bubble, but in this weekly column, Ripley’s puts those delusions to the test, turning your world upside down, because you can’t always…Believe It! In today’s world many misconceptions have been perpetuated-becoming modern day “facts”-when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over.
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