Lemming Suicide Myth

June 24, 2010 by retrieverman

Yep. It’s just not true. It was staged for TV. Blame Walt Disney.

I guess we’re a bunch of lemmings for believing this hoax and then allowing it to enter our public discourse.

It is now an idiom– an idiom based upon a fallacy.

Posted in Absolute Piffle, trivia, wildlife | Tagged lemming, lemming suicide myth | 4 Comments

on June 25, 2010 at 11:22 am Christopher@Borderwars

Just imagine if this broke wide: “Disney drives cute fuzzy animals to their deaths!”

It’s just so antithetical to what Disney built their empire on: fostering love of cute, fuzzy, and anthropomorphic animals of all sorts + princesses.
on June 25, 2010 at 1:33 pm labpack

Well, the Disney film is a myth! I’ve seen lemmings migrating in masses – and it is quite a sight, believe me!

There is no regular yearly pattern for the migration but most obviously it is due to the lack of nourishment in their present habitat.
- on June 25, 2010 at 2:36 pm retrieverman
  
  Gray squirrels used to migrate like that when the Eastern US was nothing more than a vast forest.
  
  Lewis and Clark came across a migration of gray squirrels swimming across the Ohio River, from what is today Ohio to what is now West Virginia. A large contingent of these gray squirrels were melanistic.
on June 26, 2010 at 11:41 am Christopher@BorderWars

The melanistic ones are crazy. I had several run ins with them in college, one launched itself into the front spokes on my bike… didn’t end well.

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