Comments on: Norway Lemming (Lemmus lemmus)

By: clintellectual

clintellectual — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:53:13 +0000

poor lemmings, getting abused by disney like that. doesn’t surprise me though.

By: J.R. Atkins

J.R. Atkins — Fri, 29 May 2009 05:13:21 +0000

Exactly! Or as you used to say, “Well, I’m not everybody else’s mother!”

By: grace

grace — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:05:49 +0000

Very interesting information and a great drawing. A lemming (as we usually think of them) is what a mother wants her child not to be. “If your friend jumped in the ocean would you do the same thing?”

By: J.R. Atkins

J.R. Atkins — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:38:29 +0000

Ted, I'm sure there must be an accepted ethical code for documentarians about what you can and can't recreate. In one example I read, someone mentioned David Attenborough's The Life of Birds. Apparently, there's one really cool shot of a duck flying, and the camera is pointed from one wing tip to the other. Well, they used a trained duck that flew alongside a car, and filmed it from the car. First of all, you can train ducks? And second, I think it's totally different since, presumably, the point of that was to show an up-close look at a bird in flight. Now, if Attenborough had said, "Ducks are known to fly alongside cars, and some drivers help the ducks migrate by driving south for days," or something like that, and then used the footage of the trained duck as illustration, that would be analogous to the lemmings. Also, I don't think I mentioned that the only lemmings that have ever been known to plunge into the sea are the Norway lemmings in Norway, not the lemmings in Canada, where White Wilderness was filmed, which are a different species. Plus, Canada is much bigger than Norway and there's no real reason to keep going to the sea. Chilejack/Dad, skeptical is good. It's cynical that's a problem!

By: chilejack

chilejack — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:39:42 +0000

Very nice drawing! Be careful, you might become skeptical!

By: Ted Slampyak

Ted Slampyak — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:39:19 +0000

Oh, almost forgot to add: beautiful drawing! Very bold composition, and great line work!

By: Ted Slampyak

Ted Slampyak — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:36:20 +0000

Wow. Fascinating!

Growing up on such documentaries, I often wondered how they were made. I mean, obviously back then they didn’t have microscopic fiber-optic cameras to inset into anthills or prairie dog tunnels — so something was staged. And I guess, if you believe something that’s wrong, you’re going to stage the wrong event, and people will think you’ve recorded something that was actually happening the way you say it was.

It’s just to hard to watch those poor lemmings falling to their deaths off those cliffs, especially now that I know they were pushed! Of course, I also felt bad about the tribbles when they died…