Disney's "Suicide" Film

In my early experiences as a summer naturalist at Watoga State Park, I often used nature films for evening programs. These films were shipped from Charleston,WV by the Park Division. I used many Disney films such as Bear Country, Beaver Valley, and White Wilderness. The early Disney documentary film makers would not present scientific truths if falsifying the facts would make a better movie! (I did not realize this back in the 1960's when I was young and naive!) These nature films were sold and made in the 1950's as true life adventures.

Let me tell you all the story behind one film - "White Wilderness". The critter below is a lemming. Lemmings are small rodents, usually found in or near the Arctic, in tundra biomes. The notion that lemmings, overcome by deep-rooted impulses, deliberately run over a cliff in their millions came not from a biologist, but from that other animal behaviourist - Walt Disney.

One myth deeply entrenched in our language is that of the "Lemming Suicide Plunge" - where lemmings in the millions, apparently overcome by deep-rooted impulses, deliberately run over a cliff, to be dashed to their deaths on the rocks below, or to drown in the raging ocean. This was said to be nature's way of population control. Indeed, this myth is now a metaphor for the behaviour of crowds of people who foolishly follow each other, lemming-like, regardless of the consequences.

Lemmings do have their regular wild fluctuations in population - and when the numbers are high, the lemmings do migrate.

The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, White 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. Indeed, animals live to thrive and survive.

Think how strange it is to think that Disney could be so unkind to a rodent, the lemming, when another rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and ole Walt should have had a long talk about this one!

Here is the "Suicide" film for your perusal!