Lemmings are much maligned

IT was on the fringes of a lounge bar conversation about the water charges when I heard something that annoyed me. 

Someone with no sympathy for the demonstrations said the protesters were acting like lemmings.

My annoyance was because this accusation is so unfair to lemmings.

They are small rodents, 7 to 15 centimetres long, with short tails and long, soft fur which, in many species, is rather attractively patterned. They live in arctic and sub-arctic tundra in northern Europe, Asia and North America. By nature they’re solitary animals but, like most rodents, they have a high reproductive rate and this leads to a boom-and-bust population cycle. This is particularly true of two species, the Norway lemming found in northern Europe and the brown lemming found in North America. Populations seem to peak roughly every four years and this is followed by a drop to near extinction levels.

When this happens the rodents migrate, looking for fresh habitat. Some die, often drowning while trying to cross rivers or other water bodies. They do not commit suicide by hurling themselves off cliffs into the ocean.

This widely held misconception is largely the fault of Walt Disney. In the 1950s the Disney Corporation decided to diversify its output of cartoon features and make wildlife documentaries. I remember watching them as a small child with an interest in nature and they were truly wonderful. Big screen, techni-colour wildlife was a revelation in the days of early black-and-white television. The 1958 film White Wilderness about arctic wildlife won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

The same film had a scene in which masses of lemmings committed suicide by jumping off a cliff into the Arctic Ocean. It’s very convincing and clips from it circulate on YouTube. This has cemented into the public consciousness one of the most durable of wildlife myths.

The reality was revealed afterwards by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary called Cruel Camera. The Disney director, unable to find any examples of lemmings committing suicide, had several hundred of them trapped in Hudson Bay and flown to Calgary in Alberta, where he was filming. Here, a long way from the Arctic Ocean, he had his technicians construct a turntable which propelled the live lemmings off a convenient cliff past the camera lenses. I can’t find any record of how many inoffensive lemmings were killed in order to film the sequence but it must rank as one of the most unethical events in movie-making history.

And over half a century later lemmings are still being used as a metaphor for senseless mass movements and many of the people using these metaphors are convinced that lemmings are suicidal animals. The power of the media is truly awesome.