Disney's horrible story about lemmings

 This morning, the NPR program Here & Now broadcast a 9:28 segment, How a deceptive Disney documentary shaped what we know about lemmings. It was the origins of the false lemmings going over a cliff into the arctic ocean story. 


From my memory:

The origin story came from a Walt Disney nature film. Disney pioneered this kind of nature filming. A Canadian documentary dived into the origin of Disney's lemmings over the cliff story. It turns out the whole disgusting thing was staged for TV. None of it was real. 

Real lemmings were intentionally killed for staging of the lemmings over the cliff filming. Walt Disney's cousin Roy commented, paraphrasing: "Yeah whatever. A few hundred lemmings were killed but they would have been killed anyway. That might have been called cruelty. So what? Fuck off."

What Disney did was collect hundreds of lemming from poverty-stricken native Canadian children hundreds of miles to the north, worth 25¢ each, and ship them to the Yukon. Then Disney filmed the lemmings "leaping" into a river in the Yukon that Disney shamelessly and falsely claimed to the Arctic Ocean. Disney did not film Disney employees chasing the poor little critters to their deaths. Once the imported lemmings got wet in the river, they died of hypothermia shortly thereafter. And the narrator of the film commented sadly on the sad death of the hundreds of poor dead little critters floating on the water. The lemmings weren't even arctic lemmings. Disney got the species wrong.

Darned Canadian documentary people. Grumble, grumble . . . . . they wrecked it for Disney . . . . . grumble, grumble . . . . . 





Actual lemmings:








This one ain't jumping


By Germaine: Truth seeker, even when it's not pleasant

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