US 9

Knut Hunstad Knut.Hunstad at veg.sintef.no
Wed Oct 4 08:53:05 CET 1995


Some more about "The Lemming with the Locket":

Those scenes with the "lemming blanket" going into the sea is _not_ very
realistic. I point this out because the "lemming suicide"-myth this is based
on is one of those myths I know quite many still believe in. Not so hard to
understand, since there _are_ "lemming years" when there are plentiful of
lemmings "everywhere". Those years you have to be careful with drinking
water even in the mountains, because there might be rotting lemmings in
there. But that they suddenly swarm together and drown themselves in the
ocean is still a myth and nothing else.

On rec.arts.disney there was some discussion a while ago about this, because
there have been Disney wildlife movies showing this phenomenon. But it seems
the expert conclusion (if you trust self-acclaimed experts in a newsgroup)
was that these scenes where fake. They probably pushed a few lemmings over
an edge and cut the takes so it seemed like a lot of them. So much for
scientifical approach!

That said, I do _not_ mean to imply that Barks shouldn't have used that
myth, whether he realized it was a myth or not! I mean, myths are what the
best stories are made around, right? And TLwtL is surely one good story...

P.S.: I am _not_ an expert on this, but beeing norwegian I have read
everything I happened to stumble upon about it since I first read this story
in my childhood. The above conclusion is based on what seems to me to be
most accepted among biologists. If anyone wants more details or wants to
protest against the correctness, I will dig deeper into the matter some day.

Knut Hunstad
Trondheim, Norway







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