The Lemmings Episode

In this premiere episode of the podcast, we'll explore how the population boom-and-bust cycle of the Norway lemming led to a widely held belief that the animals commit mass suicide rather than starve. It's also a wide-ranging motif in pop culture, largely in the form of saying that if someone blindly follows the herd without considering any consequences, they're a "lemming." Find out more by listening to this episode and exploring the Show Notes at the end of the Transcript. 

Transcript

Lemmings Don’t Leap – Episode 1 

Welcome to the premiere episode of Lemmings Don’t Leap, a podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about.

I’m your host, Allan Britnell. 

 For the launch edition, we’re going to address the elephant in the room. Or, more appropriately, some small fuzzy rodents perched on the edge of a cliff. 

Lemmings look a bit like a hamster crossed with a gerbil. There are about 20 different species of lemmings around the world, and they’ve adapted to live in a variety of habitats, ranging from forests and bogs to the edge of the Arctic Circle. 

The species most commonly associated with today’s tale is the Norway lemming, which is found in the Arctic tundra region of Norway, and also parts of neighbouring Finland, Sweden and Russia. 

Despite their diminutive size and remote habitat, lemmings hold an outsized place in Western lore and pop culture.

Specifically, if we encounter a group of people mindlessly doing the same thing, we refer to them as “lemmings.” Follow someone else’s lead without asking why you’re doing it: you’re a lemming. Join in a group activity without worrying about the consequences because you don’t want to be left out: you’re a lemming. Recklessly throw yourself off a cliff because everyone around you is doing the same thing: you’re a lemming. 

That last example is tied to the great myth about lemmings. Some listeners will likely be familiar with the macabre backstory of why we refer to someone who blindly follows the herd as a lemming. It all comes down to mass suicide. As in the fact that lemmings have a reputation for hurtling themselves by the thousands off oceanside cliffs to their watery graves.

 This concept is frequently used as a trope in comic strips. I’ve included links to a few examples in the show notes. 

They also regularly creep into pop culture, including a low-tech video game that featured a herd of green-haired lemmings that you lead across the screen, an animated film called Grizzy & The Lemmings, and even a French psychological thriller called Lemming. The name is apparently the same in English and French, but I’ve never seen the movie, so I can’t tell you what the connection to rodents is.

Where does this idea of suicidal rodents come from? Its origins are in the species’ population boom and bust cycles. 

While lemmings don’t breed as fast as rabbits, they are quite prolific and get started very early. Female Norway lemmings start breeding at two to three weeks of age, and can have 10 or more babies in a litter. They also breed year-round, so they can have dozens of offspring in their short one- to three-year lifespans. 

So they can quickly make a lot of lemmings. When food runs out, they’ll stray far and wide to find more. Sometimes, water gets in the way.

 Lemmings can swim, and when food supplies dwindle, they will cross water to get to greener pastures. But not all swimmers make it to the other side. Those that don’t make it drown. This idea of lemmings committing mass suicide basically comes from a bunch of dead lemmings floating in the water and concluding that they, obviously enough, must have committed suicide. 

 Now, if you can clearly picture in your head a bunch of lemmings hurling themselves off of a cliff and tumbling towards the ocean below, you’re not imagining it. You were just misled. Misled by none other than Mr. Walt Disney.

Specifically, your mental image comes from a scene in an Academy Award-winning 1958 Disney “documentary” White Wilderness. This hour-long movie featured tales of how various animals survived and even thrived in the harsh Arctic climate. Included in the film was the story of lemmings’ supposed propensity to off themselves en masse. 

Of course, the Disney producers couldn’t find any footage of lemmings leaping to their death, so they faked it. They filmed the scene in landlocked Alberta, which doesn’t have any native lemmings. So, they imported some and then used a record turntable to fling the helpless creatures into the air. 

The staged lemming suicide footage was eventually exposed in a 1982 episode of the CBC show The Fifth Estate, called Cruel Camera. Here’s a sample clip that shows the little critters tumbling down a cliff. 

The long and short of it is that lemmings do not blindly commit suicide. They just have natural population swings like many other species. 

 Oddly enough, lemmings committing mass suicide might not be the weirdest thing that people have believed about them. In the 17th century, naturalists wondered why there were suddenly so many more lemmings every few years. Naturally, they assumed they must be raining down from the sky. This leads to a potential new turn of phrase: If you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you’re a lemming. 

In the end, if you’ve learned anything from this, don’t be a lemming and blindly believe whatever you’ve been told.

If you liked this episode, coming up next is the Christopher Columbus episode. This will be followed by episodes on Vikings, misquoted quotes, 5 False Facts About Animals, and more. 

Find all episodes along with transcripts and show notes at Lemmings Don’t Leap dot Buzzsprout dot com, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Share your comments, critiques and suggestions for future episodes at LemmingsDontLeapPodcast@gmail.com.

Show notes 

Multiple credible sources debunk this fairly well-believed Arctic legend, including Snopes, The Smithsonian, and The Encyclopedia Britannica. Each cites Disney’s “documentary” White Wilderness as the source for the modern belief (backed up by visuals) that lemmings fling themselves off of cliffs en masse.

The myth is usually attributed to Norway lemmings. Here’s the Wiki page on that particular species.

You can watch the full CBC Fifth Estate episode of Cruel Camera here. 

There are countless examples of the lemming suicide jumps used in comic strips, including Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C. 

The video game Lemmings launched in 1991, and became one of the most popular games of the decade, before dropping off a cliff. 

If for some strange reason you’re interested, here’s a link to the trailer for the French-language movie, Lemming. And if you have young kids, Grizzly and the Lemmings looks like it might be fun, if not fact-based.