Boing
Boing today links to a
Great
Moments in Science story,
Lemmings Suicide Myth
The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt
Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed
in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to
lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from
Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the
lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and
then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge
sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a
river. It's easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild
animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom
followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show
than the lemmings' self-implemented population-density management
plan.
So lemmings do not commit mass suicide.
The metaphor will live on, no doubt.
"That was a metaphor,
do you know what a metaphor is?".