Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior | Hacker News Reader

Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior

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192 pointsmerraksh101 comments

I had a huge argument with my philosophy professor about this. Our class was discussing the distinguishing characteristics between humans and animals. Someone brought up humans commit suicide while animals don't. The professor claimed that was false and brought up lemmings as evidence. I chimed in that lemming suicides were most likely myth and even if it was real, we shouldn't accept the idea of lemming suicides until we have definitive proof. He claimed lemming suicides were established fact and that if I or anyone rejected the idea in our papers on the topic, we'd be penalized for positing a factually incorrect statement. A bit of back and forth later, he said he was the ultimate authority on the topic and ended the discussion.

Naturally, in my paper, I wrote that lemming suicides were likely myth ( with sources ) and naturally I got penalized.

I still remember it years later and whenever the topic of lemming suicides come up, I make it my business to correct people. Years from now, on my death bed, my last words will be "lemming suicide is a myth".

I must enlighten the masses!

https://jordi.platinum.edu.pl/piccies/enlighten-them.jpg

Somewhere out there, that professor finally read evidence that there is no lemming suicides and now regrets everyday for penalizing you. At least that is how it is playing out in my head.

But lots of animals commit suicide. You don't need to talk about lemmings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autothysis

And your discussion sounds with your professor sounds really stupid - he literally claimed to be the ultimate authority on lemmings? An academic with a chair said that? Sounds so unlikely I'm not sure I believe you.

An academic with a chair said that? Sounds so unlikely I'm not sure I believe you.

Are you now claiming to be the ultimate authority on academics and their interactions with 'paidleaf?

> Are you now claiming to be the ultimate authority on academics and their interactions with 'paidleaf?

No?

I said 'I'm not sure I believe you' - that only makes a statement about what I believe about this interaction. It doesn't claim anything about ultimate authority at all.

> But lots of animals commit suicide. You don't need to talk about lemmings.

We have to talk about lemmings when we are talking about conscious human-like suicide because lemmings are the only animals that purportedly had conscious intentional suicides like human being. After all, the philosophical debate was "the difference between humans and animals". I actually brought up honey bees committing suicide ( once they sting, they die ). But the professor rejected it ( rightly so ) because it wasn't conscious and intentional suicide. For example, a parent storming a burning building to save their child and dying in the process isn't suicide in the human sense. A female octopus giving birth and dying isn't suicide.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/30/octopus-c...

A soldier going to war and dying isn't suicide. A mother bison trying to save her calf from predators and dying in the process isn't suicide. There is a difference between sacrifice and intentional conscious suicide where no one benefits.

> And your discussion sounds with your professor sounds really stupid

It wasn't. It was one of my favorite classes in college and hence why I decided to double major in philosophy. It was the first time I can say I really thought about something. If the class was "really stupid" it wouldn't have left such an indelible mark on me.

> he literally claimed to be the ultimate authority on lemmings?

Yes. He believed it was a fact just like the earth was a sphere is a fact. And ultimately, he is the one grading the term paper and he is the ultimate authority. Do you really expect a professor to back down on things he believe to be facts?

> An academic with a chair said that?

Yes. What's so surprising about that? Do you know what an academic with a chair is? An expert. Someone with authority.

> Sounds so unlikely I'm not sure I believe you.

Are you an "associate professor" by any chance? What is so unbelievable about it? Why are you so defensive?

As someone who briefly concentrated in Philosophy, your professor sounds awfully idiotic. Not even for having a wrong perspective whatsoever, but to be teaching a class about reasoning and simultaneously claim the role of god, where all reasoning must lead back to his conclusions.

keep fighting the good fight

My takeaway from oppressive teachers is different. I learned that if you cannot win the fight or war against them, then don't start a fight or war. Oppressive teachers remind me that there is a survival element, for students, to the academic life and that the grading scheme is most likely biased with at least some subjectivity.

Oppressive teachers show me a wonderful thing: how complex the real world is as opposed to ideals. I also dislike them with a passion.

Never argue with philosophy professors using scientific grade evidence. As you said, they consider themselves the authority and will brook no dissent.

School's name and professor's name please, just so your comment has evidence. ;)

The fact that a philosopher claims to be an academic reference regarding hard science is sad.

It is already difficult for philosophy to avoid being grouped with dance, music and volleyball - academically speaking, and then someone makes it even more difficult by being silly.

Disclamer: as a physicist I classify philosophy together with the subjects mentioned earlier and I play volleyball a lot.

This is covered in the 99% Invisible podcast episode 256 Sounds Natural - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sounds-natural/

I found this entire episode fascinating, especially the part about Elephant footsteps being nearly silent in the real world.

I was lucky enough to have an elephant ride through the jungle in Thailand, can confirm that they are almost silent, only noise is the brush being pushed to one side on a path just wide enough for a person to walk. Amazing animals.

https://www.thedodo.com/elephant-rides-trek-1132645600.html :-(

Not so lucky for the elephant though I'm afraid to say[1] :( The best way to experience elephants is on safari, where you can get close to truly wild elephants in their natural environment - something that to me at least feels much more rewarding than riding one in captivity. With a well chosen safari the fees you pay will be going to local guides and helping support and protect the animals too.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/asia/elephant-riding-ph...

There are conservation parks, which to my surprise still let you do a limited amount of riding (as you wash them in the river) but are supposed to be rescuing elephants from mistreatment elsewhere. The riding is presumably offered as a way of funding the place (particularly given how much the elephants eat). So depending on where you go it may not be entirely terrible.

Have to admit I'm torn about the whole issue. Animals in the wild are amazing but how may people can go see elephants in the wild. I recently brought my son to a dolphin show, while he has a new appreciation keeping intelligent animals in a tank that would normally roam over 1000s of KMs really bothers me.

With new technology such as VR, live streams, television, photographs there has to be a better way to do this rather than holding them in captivity

You should watch The Cove (2009).

Disney popularized the myth, but I think it was around before them. I think they wanted to get video of those famous/interesting lemming suicides but the lemmings wouldn't do it, so they coerced them into it.

Tldr: Disney committed lemming genocide

Why the downvotes?

From White Wilderness, as the movie shows drowning Lemmings, put there by Disney employees, the narrator goes:

"And so is acted out, the legend of mass suicide and destruction of a species."

https://youtu.be/xMZlr5Gf9yY?t=2m50s

>Why the downvotes?

Probably because it's inaccurate/exaggerated in a couple ways.

1. Genocide refers to humans, not animals, and requires the act to be targeted at a group of people that share some sort of traits (typically race, or cultural identity).

2. Disney imported "no more than a few dozen lemmings," which doesn't really meet the numbers the word typically is used for.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-wilderness/

Disney killed lemmings, and unless they attempted to wipe out all lemmings that share a particular cultural identity, it's probably pretty insensitive to use it in this context.

Genocide is by definition against a group having common genetic/ethnic identity.

One might also consider that animals are people, too.

However, I don't think you can make the case that Disney set out to wipe lemmings from the earthwe.

Wouldn't xenocide be a more apt description? A quick search for genocide gives the definition of:

"the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation."

While xenocide is described as:

xenocide (plural xenocides)

The killing of a stranger or foreigner. (science fiction) The genocide of an entire alien species. (US, colloquial) The intentional killing of an entire foreign (plant or animal) species.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xenocide

Either is fine really, just seems like a semantic curiosity.

Why? Genocide is by derivation the killing or wiping out of a genetic population. Why can’t that be applied to purposeful extinction of an animal species?

Probably -- the problem is that no one actually knows the word xenocide who isn't an Orson Scott Card fan.

Since 1532 according to https://wonderclub.com/Wildlife/mammals/norwegian_lemming.ht...

Lemming suicide is also mentioned on page 66 of the first edition of Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey: https://archive.org/stream/confessionsofeng00dequ_1#page/66/...

This was published in 1832 and revised in 1856.

Talk about unnecessary cruelty, lemmings are quite cute creatures, can't imagine what was going thru their heads ("the Disney filmmakers") when they threw all those lemmings off a cliff to their deaths for a film.

This'll look good! And it's what management expects!

> lemmings are quite cute creatures

The most important attribute for animal rights causes it seems. If Facebook campaigns are any measure...

I had an environmental ethics professor in college. Her pet cause was the plight of the atlantic bluefin tuna. She frequently lamented that only the cute animals get any real support.

And yet we eat both bunnies (cute) and pigs (arguably not cute).

Fish, though, yeah, they're not getting any cuteness bonus. Not much outcry about "factory farming" in aquaculture.

I have recently, and irrationally, stopped eating octopus because they're so smart. Maybe some viral videos of tuna doing amazing things would help...

Only you can prevent blob fish hatred.

> and pigs (arguably not cute).

Ah come on![0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBJgCDBx2bU

EDIT: P.S.

> Not much outcry about "factory farming" in aquaculture.

I try not to eat Salmon; it's pretty much always farmed, often in ugly conditions which is a travesty for such a noble creature.

If you're going to eat salmon anyway (and lots of people do), it's much less destructive to eat it factory farmed. This actually goes for every single fish.

This is completely true, but don't be kidding yourself you're eating something you're not!

factory farming contributes to ocean dead zones

how so?

...how?

There's a kind of a compromise going on here. Wild Salmon stocks are limited and were it not for farming demand would outstrip what's available. Apparently the tradeoff here is "dead zones" in the ocean unfortunately.

Of course, as I say, the farmed salmon is not the same fish as the wild one. The flesh is dyed pink. The flavour doesn't benefit from the wild salmon's varied diet, and the texture isn't developed by all that swimming upstream.

There is a very wide variance in the quality of farmed salmon too, to the point where you really can't be sure what you're eating unless you actually know the farm it's coming from.

I've heard it said that farmed salmon carries little of the health benefits of wild salmon. Personally I'd prefer to just pay a lot to eat salmon very rarely than to eat farmed salmon frequently. But everywhere you go there is otherwise indiscriminate demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness

Even animals react to it. A live and let live attitude (if not one of protectiveness) towards harmless/cute living things is perfectly healthy it seems.

You play the hands you are dealt.

How many species have gone extinct for purely natural reasons again?

Humans are a non-linear term in the equation, but the idea of an untouched and immutable nature is incorrect.

They actually threw the lemmings in the Bow river rather than the sea, so it's likely that most of them actually survived.

> can't imagine what was going thru their heads

"Imma make lots of money from this"

Cruelty was par for the course when it came to nature documentaries unfortunately. Most nature documentaries of the past were staged. One of the most infamous one was where they would trap and drug jaguars and them dump them on the riverbank and wait for caimans to kill it.

https://youtu.be/huGJmQU4Piw?t=159

Notice how the jaguar can't move from that spot even with a bunch of large caiman right in front of it? It's almost like one of the jaguar's paws were pinned down to keep it in one spot. Wonder why? Could it be cameras were heavy and clunky contraptions back then that you could realistically focus on one area at a time? Can't capture jaguar footage if the jaguar is allowed to move out of frame. Or it was drugged so much that it had no idea what was going on.

Disney is a money-many endeavor that sometimes cuts corners and spreads untruths. I'm not against making money, just against those who would lie and defraud others to make more of it.

Businessinsider.com has a page that shows four that Disney apologized about or said were untrue. [1]

In the same way, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, and others were believed to be great reporters, even though they created their own sensationalized fake news to get ratings.

One of the items from Rather was called "Fake but Accurate" by Rather. "The New York Times' headline report on this interview, including the phrase "Fake but Accurate," created an immediate backlash from critics of CBS's broadcast. The conservative-leaning Weekly Standard proceeded to predict the end of CBS's news division." [2]

One of Williams stories about being in a flaming plane that was shot down was debunked by the soldiers who were in the plane with him, the plane that was unhit and unlit. Williams later apologized, saying he didn't "know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another." [3]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/discovery-channels-fake-docum...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy

[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nbcs-brian-williams-apol...

Re: Brian Williams - many leading memory scientists say that Brain Williams didn't sensationalize his story, but rather created a false memory over time. There's a lot of evidence of this, and 10+ years is a long time in terms of memory and you will start combining multiple people's stories in your own recollection.

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/was-brian-williams...

If any entertainment company is known for taking old myths and putting a new family-friendly shine on 'em it's Disney!

"White Wilderness" snippet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOOs8MaR1YM

Which is interestingly the 2nd highest ranked video when you search "lemmings" on Youtube...

Terriers stay small because they're given whiskey as pups and the way to catch a bird is to throw salt on its tail are two other childhood facts that I find hard to completely give up.

The second is more a matter of degree than principle.

325 degrees farenheit to be exact.

Or 325 lbs.

upon reading the whole article, it is mostly true.

"mass dispersal" occurs when the population grows too much and the food runs out, sometimes it can be very directional, and sometimes they will pile up on the shore until they gets too packed and they try to swim across frigid waters.

the Disney mass suicide documentary says this can be observed every 7 - 10 years, and then they over dramatized how it looks

edit: removed blue planet reference, peace!

edit2: alright folks, what is inaccurate or disagreeable about what I wrote? I'm downvoted so far that I can't even post a rebuttal anymore and have zero feedback about how I read the Alaska Government's article incorrectly

Blue Planet is not filming captive animals in faked environments doing unnatural behaviors.

Some of Blue Planet was filmed in aquariums. It's an open secret that David Attenborough documentaries use footage of captive animals to create a narrative.

However, they don't kill the captive animals, which is the key difference.

You will now be downvoted more for talking about the downvoting.

Give people a downvote button and they're going to downvote stuff they don't want to hear. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluding themselves.

Suicide is deliberate. Any unfortunate death due to overcrowding attributed to suicide is simply false. There is no evidence of intentional death or racing towards a cliff, merely that when faced with no other apparent route of escape, they have a great chance of dying when trying to cross a body of frigid water. That's entirely different from the portrayal by Disney and the associated myth.

I’ve never seen the Disney “documentary”, but then I’ve heard this myth many times before. And never, not once, is suicide meant as intentional, but rather that they’d just follow the leader off a cliff or something. Like the ants that can be made to walk in a circle forever (also a myth).

Just a few days ago on hn I discovered the stanford prison expweiment was largely faked, and now this. I guess this is good reason to be suspicious of pop science factoids that often get thrown around in discussions.

Oh wow, this brings me back. I did a report in 6th grade about this, and had to try really hard to convince all my friend the lemmings game lied to them. I remember typing it on an electric typewriter.

An entire genre of adventure game, reduced to simple entertainment. :-)

Yet another black mark against Disney's attempts to make "nature more interesting" only to be just making up just so stories.

Adventure game? Always thought of it as a puzzle game.

Wait.. is the game based on this same fictional fact?

Yes, but it existed before the game or Disney were around.

It took me a while to realize that you were saying that the myth was around before the game and Disney. For some reason I thought you meant the game was around before Disney.

You thought that because the last (parent's) sentence was talking about the game, and "it" tends to refer to the last noun that was talked about.

Wouldn't the last noun be 'the fictional fact'?

Not that different from the concept of a clown. The very existence of their sadness and aimless being should lift our spirts.

I'm still mad at the discovery channel for convincing me that Megaladon was still out there.

There's a great short story by Arthur C. Clarke about lemmings, but he does admit in a later foreword that the premise is actually a myth.

So do we know whether Disney actually killed lemmings for a film?

There's some people claiming that 'most survived' and others accepting that they were killed.

While I'm not much of an animal rights activist, killing animals relatively ethically in medical research seems like a far cry from tossing lemmings off of cliffs.

In unrelated news, 500 sheep killed themselves by jumping off a cliff in Turkey: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/500-sheep-die-in-mass-suici...

And myth explanations spawn more myths. I had read (forgot the source) that it was a myth and that the lemmings were really jumping off cliffs to swim to an island people weren't generally aware of.

Although swimming to an island is closer to the truth of swimming across a river than suicide is.

This is triply interesting for me because I had never heard of this myth and, reading the comments, I appear the be the only one out of the loop on the myth itself or the game. I wonder how many other pop-sci myths I'm unaware of.

Curious if you’ve heard of someone being called a “lemming” meaning they’re easily coerced or will follow a leader blindly.

Only ever heard someone be called a "lemon" which was I presumed because they were so winsome they made you purse up your mouth like you'd just tasted lemon.

Congratulations on being one of today’s lucky ten thousand then!

I found this podcast here in the comments for more such things, called “99% Invisible” apparently elephants walk surprisingly silently instead of the thunderous stomping in the cinema.

> I had never heard of this myth

so... never played the Lemmings video game ?

Oh wow, they killed animals just to make a film?

I am a Disney fan but never knew about this. Disappointed. I would think modern Disney probably is much better than that nowadays. I think nothing like this would happen today thanks to CGI.

If you are OK with eating meat, you should be OK with killing animals for a movie, in my opinion. When you eat a steak, you could eat potatoes or something instead, but you choose to eat an animal because you like how it tastes. I don't see that as any different from killing animals for a movie, in both cases you are unnecessarily killing an animal for your enjoyment.

Well when you eat a animal, you are doing it because eating is necessary, and some people are picky eaters conditioned to like meat since childhood.

But I feel like killing them for a movie is a waste, unless they are eaten later maybe but still not too much better. Like if you kill a animal, you should try to use every single part of it as possible. Same thing the Native Americans believe.

Disney seemed as determined to create a dark analogy as the Standford Prison guy.

I'm glad we had the myth for a bit, if only for the game.

There should be a list of commonly known facts that people who are new to the internet have to read so they don't think things like this are novel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

Which among many other things, mentions the Lemming Suicide myth:

> Lemmings do not engage in mass suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. This misconception was popularized by the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff.[234] The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at least the late 19th century.

Thanks for this list.. you have killed my productivity this afternoon.

This is one of my favorite wikipedia pages. I'm not aware of any other resource that does so much to fix our broken epistemology.

That's not epistemology... epistemology is about the fundamental nature of truth and knowledge, like whether reality is shared and knowable. I think you mean 'common sense.' Though nowadays always spoken of positively, originally 'common sense' referred to the sense of commoners, being incomplete and unreasoned and just an accumulation of happenstance. That's pretty much what common misconceptions are.

I know what epistemology is, but apparently you don't. "the fundamental nature of truth and knowledge, like whether reality is shared and knowable" is not epistemology but metaphysics. Epistemology may dip into metaphysics, (and vice-versa) but they are generally distinct fields.

By "our broken epistemology" I mean "our broken methodologies of evaluating the truth of our beliefs and the certainty of our knowledge". The brokenness of our practical epistemology is why these common misconceptions not only exist, but continue to dominate.

I could have been more precise and said "our broken epistemological systems",

I hate to be the guy that posts xkcd links.. . But: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

There's an appropriate xkcd for most any conversation. Posting them is far more beneficial to the community than downvoting them.

Nature documentaries are laboriously produced works of fiction.

Like any other form of art, it tells you a lie to speak the truth.

Even more childhood dreams destroyed. Fuck Micky Mouse!

This is not my personal experience.

Lemmings are fearless creatures that will scream to any animal, including humans, that cross their path.

I have seen a Lemmings confronting a crow. The crow sends the lemmings flying on three different occasions until it took the lemming dead body and left flying. The lemmings never tried to run or hide, it just was screaming at the crow until its very last moments.

So I can see that "mass suicide" is a myth. But it has some true on it looking at the lemmings' behaviour.

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