Lemmings

I had a revelation today which involves lemmings. I grew up having learned certain things about the little animals; things that involved over-population and cliffs and things. If you were also a child of the 70's or earlier, you probably know exactly what I am talking about. My first revelation is that this fixation with lemmings did not continue to younger generations. I asked people in my house tonight what they knew about lemmings, and my very natural history minded children pretty much all said, "Huh? What are they?" 

So for those younger people who read my blog, who share my children's confusion over lemmings, I'll give you a little primer. Lemmings are little rodents who are related to hamsters and gerbils in who in arctic tundra biomes. Growing up, it was a long-held belief that when the population of these little creatures grew too large to support their numbers, they would commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs into the ocean. Having learned this "fact" as a child, I assumed that what people told me was true. Lemmings pretty much never came up again except as a reference to inevitable, senseless death. 

Am I the only one who was never informed that this "fact" of lemming mass suicide was false? How did I miss this? The only reason I know better now is because of the book I'm reading, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah. (It's a very interesting book and I highly recommend it.) Anyway, in the chapter I am in, she references the false narrative of the lemmings. First, I had to think if anyone had told me it was false. Then I had to be dismayed that no one had. Then I did some fact checking just to be sure. So here's the real story. Lemmings migrate. Sometimes lemmings migrate by crossing bodies of water... successfully. Every so often lemmings try to migrate over bodies of water that are too wide for them to cross (i. e. the ocean). 

To finish the story of lemming mis-information, I need to share one more story. In 1958 Walt Disney studios produced a documentary called White Wilderness focusing on the arctic. In the movie, there is a scene of lemmings walking across the frozen ground. A cliff looms ahead and over the little lemmings plummet into the ocean. The lemmings behind pushing the ones in front over. The movie was shown in classrooms for years. I am pretty sure I watched it because at the description of the lemmings, I could picture it. If you went to school in the 70's, you probably saw it to. J. posited that it was probably also shown on The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night as well. It is probably this scene that so firmly entrenched the idea of suicidal lemmings into the minds of an entire generation.

But get this (I need someone to be incensed along with me here), the scene was completely manufactured. Local children were hired to catch lemmings for the film producers by paying them (the children) 25 cents a head. The lemmings were then shipped to Canada where they were filmed in front of a painted background, the handful of lemmings walking in circles to create the illusions of a large number of lemmings. The poor little lemmings were then loaded in a truck and dumped into a river (where they drowned) while the cameras rolled. That's not exactly the working definition of suicide. I'll pause for a moment while you readjust your view of the world. 

That's pretty bad, but it gets worse. There were plenty of scientists who were committed to the idea of mass suicide by a population of species. Actually, the scientists who found it most interesting and compelling were those who were proponents of eugenics. (It all just got a lot more awful, huh?) It seems that with an influx of immigrants and refuges, there was a concern with the "good" races (ok, just race singular. White people. Actually, even more specifically Western Europeans and those descended from them.) would be overrun by those who were inferior. These scientists felt as though there were just so dang many non-white people that they wondered how they were going to survive the inevitable flood. 

Enter the theories about lemmings.

Do I need to connect the dots? This was all taking place in the early 1900's and really hit its stride in the late 1920' and early 1930's. Guess who read the books that these "scientists" published? Yep, Hitler. He is recorded as mentioning how taken he was with their theories and what an impact they had on his thinking. You know, lemmings... mass suicide for the greater good. Or maybe things just need to be helped along... 

It is all pretty vile. 

Ideas have power. Power that has extremely long-lasting effects and consequences. Be careful what you think.