The page claims that during the filming of a 1958 Disney documentary, White Wilderness, the film crew imported lemmings into Alberta, Canada, (not a natural habitat for the animals) then herded a group of a few dozen lemmings over a cliff and into the water in order to stage a mass migration and demonstrate their reported suicidal behavior. We’ve encountered this site before while researching questions for Ask Yahoo! and have come to rely on its unceremonious presentation of the cold hard facts. Our first clue that lemmings don’t commit group suicide came when we spotted a web page from the Urban Legends Reference Pages in our results. The lemming population does wax and wane cyclically, the scientists confirmed, but the periodic dip in numbers is due to predators, not mass suicide. Not so, say European researchers who recently completed a 15-year study of the creatures in their native habitat. Thanks mainly to faked footage of migrating lemmings hurtling en masse over a cliff in the Oscar-winning 1958 Disney documentary ‘White Wilderness,’ it has been popularly believed for decades that the tiny arctic rodents have an inborn death wish — supposedly nature’s way of thinning out the herd. Most of those cute stories you get in chain emails are debunked on this website).Ĭlaim: During the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness, the film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.ĭisney Fiasco and Current Research – Ĭlick for Lemming Suicide Article (Snopes is a website that investigates urban legends – like the lady who dried her cat off in a microwave. Together with the voles and muskrats, they make up the subfamily Arvicolinae (also known as Microtinae), which forms part of the largest mammal radiation by far, the superfamily Muroidea, which also includes the rats, mice, hamsters, and gerbils.ĭisney Crew Chases Lemmings to Fake Suicide Lemmings are small rodents, usually found in or near the Arctic, in tundra biomes. That’s just sick knowing they were chased off the cliff. The destruction of a species it would seem…. So it’s acted out the legend of mass suicide. Soon the arctic sphere is dotted with tiny bobbing bodies. But gradually strength wanes, determination ebbs away. And if it’s a lake, it must have a farther shore. But as nearly as he can surmise, it would appear that the lemmings consider this body of water just another lake. It’s not given to man to understand all of nature’s mysteries. Others find the beaches by a roundabout way, but they too crash into the waves. Not towards land strangely, but away from shore toward the far horizon. All seem to survive the ordeal, for now they begin to swim. Casting themselves bodily out into space. The video shows dozens of lemmings jumping into the water and drowning. Or search for “white wilderness lemming”. Because of the over population, many have to migrate and they don’t do it very well, so many die during migration.Ĭheck out the original footage of Disney’s “White Wilderness” on at: Every four years the dwindle to near extinction, then rocket back in over population. It IS true that lemmings follow a mysterious 4 year cycle. The filmmakers confused mass migration with mass suicide. This was not uncovered until a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) investigation in 1983 by producer Brian Vallee. They needed more drama footage for the movie. In a 50’s documentary by Disney, the film crew chased lemmings to their death to fake a dramatic mass suicide scene. So thanks to my friend Google, here’s the ultimate information page to answer the big question: DO LEMMINGS COMMIT SUICIDE? Someone else said I shouldn’t disagree with someone who lives near lemmings because they would know best. Someone else who lives by lemmings said yes they do. I said no, that the general public only thought they did because of a Disney fiasco. Quite a fiesty debate amongst the musicians this morning on whether Lemmings commit suicide or not.
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