Lemmings!

I can't believe I've been living this lie and clueless to the truth. Generally I don't fall for urban legends or other myths, but this one got past me until recently. I'm talking about lemmings. You know those cute little rodent creatures that like to hop off cliffs to control their population. Well, turns out its just not true. This is crazy, I thought. My first introduction to lemmings was a video game by Psygnosis. The object was to get them through a hostile maze without loosing a large number of your population. Basically a puzzle game that has a lot of lemmings going into the drink. My sister was also an animal junkie and had mentioned the whole population off cliffs thing, so I was convinced...Lemmings were truly natures retard.

Here's the truth. And yes we have Disney to blame for this....what a surprise. The following is from Snopes and Great moments in Science:

Disney's White Wilderness (1958) was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported for use in the film, purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwards, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. White Wilderness does not depict an actual lemming migration — at no time are more than a few dozen lemmings ever shown on the screen at once. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.

So right, one more lie I can chulk up for Disney. One would think a company that has a rodent for a mascot would be a bit more humane to other rodents...guess not.