Lemmings, he observed, are rather anti-social creatures. But he never found any evidence to support the legend. He carried out autopsies on dead animals and he interviewed the local Inuit people. In an effort to establish what really happens, a Canadian zoologist named Charles Krebs spent four years (c.1959-1962) ‘living with lemmings’. Widely respected among his peers for turning Arctic ethology from observational anecdote into meaningful science, Krebs recorded massive increases in lemming populations and dramatic declines. For an animal to give up its life so that another, unrelated, animal could live would finally prove that there are acts of genuine and uncomplicated altruism in nature – a discovery so sensational that it could lead to the burning of all Richard Dawkins’ books about selfish genes and maybe even a Nobel Prize for Charles Krebs. Taking the second question first, the significance of lemming suicide would be immense. So what is the truth? And why does it matter anyway? Perhaps the producers of White Wilderness rationalised in 1958 – as the producers of Frozen Planet would rationalise some fifty years later – that they were simply re-enacting a natural event that was already well known… Taking short cuts doesn’t mean that the legend isn’t true. The lemmings did not jump spontaneously… they were pushed (catapulted off a spinning carousel, to be precise). It could have been career-ending.Īccounts of the film-making vary somewhat… but it seems that the film-makers employed some Inuit children to round up a hundred or so lemmings, and then used coercion to create the scenes they wanted to record. A quest to find lemmings spontaneously leaping off cliffs would have failed – requiring the film producers to explain to Walt Disney’s senior executives why there was a film in the can showing lemmings not assembling in large groups, not jumping off cliffs, and not swimming seaward until exhaustion overcame them. LEMMINGS JUMPING OFF CLIFFS CH MOVIEOnly ‘science’ cares – and she doesn’t buy movie tickets.Īs it turned out, faking the film was a wise decision. So why bother going there at all…? Why not just buy some lemmings and fake the film a bit closer to home? The lemmings don’t have opinions, the viewers will never know and the Disney executives couldn’t care less. For a team of documentary makers in the 1950’s, burdened with movie-cameras the size of fridges, such a voyage would have been almost epic. But logistical concerns certainly would have been at centre stage… Travelling to the Northwestern Territories is a relatively straightforward journey today. They were filming lemmings – a species of rodent so populous that they supposedly commit suicide from time to time. Species protection would never have been a concern for the producers of White Wilderness. The justification given for this deception was that the film accurately represented events that occur in the wild – without intruding on an endangered species. Although this birth took place in a Dutch zoo, the film makers pretended that it had been filmed in the Arctic. As recently as 2011, the BBC wildlife documentary series, Frozen Planet, broadcast footage of a polar bear giving birth. But science and documentary making are expensive enterprises, and so corners have always been cut. The notion of fake wildlife documentaries will surprise many people – especially those for whom Sir David Attenborough has been the unimpeachable face of natural history for three generations. Walt Disney’s White Wilderness showed large groups of lemmings marching purposefully across the landscape before leaping into the sea. Once there, according to legend, the lemmings jump off cliffs and swim out to sea until exhaustion finally overcomes them.Ĭoncrete evidence for the migrations/suicides seemed to be provided by a 1958 documentary film. But for many decades, it was widely believed that Arctic lemmings respond to high population density by massing in thousands and heading for the coast. No one is quite sure how the story of lemming suicide started. The Takeaway: We love a good story more than a true one.
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