Although I have used the poor lemming in a few cartoons now, it would be remiss of me not to do my bit for this adorable little rodent and put an end to the myth that lemmings have a predisposition to jumping off cliffs. Well, it’s just not true.
The origin of this misunderstanding is believed to have come from the Walt Disney 1958 animal documentary White Wilderness. Filmed in remote Canada, where lemmings are nowhere to be found, producers decided to bring in some imports for filming purposes. To illustrate the cliff plunge scene, a group of lemmings were pushed via a rotating platform, forcing them to run off a small cliff into a river, and so the myth began. Apparently the movie didn’t suggest it was a mass suicide attempt, but rather a migration undertaking, but the myth still remains today.
