Lemmings thrown off cliffs by filmmakers! The ethics of fake wildlife documentaries.

In a clip from ABC News, Chris Palmer - a veteran wildlife documentary filmmaker of 25 years - exposes some of the tricks of the trade.

Classic "wild animal" scenes that evoked great wonder and sympathy from audiences were in fact staged.
Some major hoaxes included renting tame wolves and crafting their supposed dens; a staged killer whale graveyard in the ocean; tame bears and wolves being trucked into natural settings with their animal trainers, and most shockingly of all - creating the myth of lemming suicides by throwing the critters off cliffs!
This was lemming murder; rather than suicide!

The 1958 Oscar winner "White Wilderness" tugged at heartstrings, with a now-famous scene of suicide by lemmings. It was outed as a fake several years ago. Those lemmings didn't jump to their watery death. They were hurled off those cliffs by the filmmakers. Lemming suicide is a myth.

For the interview with Palmer (who now lectures on ethical film-making), and the relevant scenes:
abcnews.go.com...

For many years wildlife auteurs felt that their deceptions and actual support of animal captivity (to make and save money) were justified.
It made people care and feel for nature and wild animals, and left the truly wild animals less disturbed.
But what about the rights of the viewer, and the "animal actors"?
Wasn't this just deception and exploitation on the conservation ticket?
Does misrepresenting nature really advance it?

A new trend is perhaps more honest, but even more exploitative.
This focuses on provoking animals to highlight their danger to humans, and creates scenes where "gonzo" film-makers invade animals' spaces, or focus on "rogue animals" and animal attacks.
This popular misrepresentation (often blamed for the wanton slaughter of sharks) was effectively critiqued by Andrew Marshall in Time Magazine: "Tie me animals down sport".
andrewmarshall.com...

Once again it is ironically marketed as conservation-minded entertainment.
The fraudulent misrepresentation and colonial stereotyping of indigenous peoples in documentaries has been much discussed.
But what about wider nature, and how "nature" is constructed for a consumer audience?
Should we be pleased or outraged?

I found out about that on ATS back around 2005 maybe.

There was a lot of video showing how they actually chased the Lemmings off the cliff.

It's amazing how a fictional video created a widespread myth that Lemmings follow each other to their deaths so easily. And that myth is quite ever present.

Just imagine all of the other more important things they lied to us about.

reply to post by halfoldman


Hi,
This brings to mind Steve Irwin, from Australia, who had that show (forget the name), but I used to watch it with my kids when they were younger. He was always out in the wild or at his family's zoo right in the faces of the wild animals. I believe he felt he was doing good and that he had a genuine love for these animals. I know there was some criticism for him holding his baby daughter all whilst engaging a croc at one point. I do believe he died from a sting ray's puncture wound, which is sad. As far as that program I think he didn't exploit the animals so much. He seemed to have a real respect for them. Other shows and programs I'm not so sure. I can see how animals would be baited and such to provide a great photo op.

Thanks for the post. I always assumed this happened, but never cared too look in to it.

In the linked article in my OP, Andrew Marshall credits Steve Irwin for starting the "gonzo" trend, with audiences seemingly demanding ever more daring scenes of handling wild animals.
Irwin to me never started that way, and seems to have become a somewhat tragic figure of his own success, and a titillated audience, and he did try to provide factual education with the stunts.

One show Marshall criticizes is "Into the Pride", where the Canadian host Dave Salmoni supposedly tries to habituate a pride of Namibian lions to ecotourists.
Habituating lions to tourists sounds silly in any case.
Some of this series left me deeply uncomfortable, and some scenes were just totally gratuitous "man-over-nature" machismo and chauvinism, that left lion cubs bewildered and traumatized.
It was certainly titillating - the host is handsome, and parades about in various stages of undress.
It definitely invokes old school masculinity in his relationship to nature, rather than anything new about nature itself.
Still, I'd hate for Salmoni to get eaten.

Although the series is on Youtube, here is a shorter clip:


Seemingly not as appreciative of handsome men as myself, Marshall points out scathingly:

I’ve given up on finding a show that teaches us how to live in harmony with animals. Instead, we invade their habitats and, when they defend themselves, we brand them violent.
This is the apparent strategy of Animal Planet’s Into the Pride. A pride of lions known for “aggression toward people” must learn to grow accustomed to ecotourists at a Namibian reserve — or else. “If they don’t calm down,” we’re told, “they will be destroyed.” Calm down? They’re wild animals. They’re calm enough when you leave them alone. But try telling that to the show’s frat-boy host, a Canadian animal trainer called Dave Salmoni. He approaches on an all-terrain vehicle and sets about acclimatizing the lions to humans — by repeatedly aggravating them. “Right now, they’re problem cats,” Salmoni explains, “because of their perception of what humans are.” In this case, a whooping doofus on a quad bike.

andrewmarshall.com...

reply to post by halfoldman


Interesting. I haven't heard them staging the lemming suicide. I'll have to look that up. Very sad.

I know you're discussing documentary movies, but photographs for the National Geographic (for example) are manipulated as well. When I was in college taking a Photoshop class, our professor let us in on that little secret. She explained that many wild-life pictures were edited to show scenes that never happened in real life. It shocked me, because I always believed that magazines like National Geographic represented truth at least in their photographs if not in their articles. I felt great disappointment. There isn't much you can believe in anymore. When the news, newspapers, documentary movies, journalists, politicians and even local groups lie to you, who can you trust anymore? The only way to find out is to live it yourself and take everything else with a big grain of salt.

P.S. I'd like to add that when National Geographic catches photographers faking photos, they reprimand them and pull the photos.....BUT..... it's still hard to tell whether they'd let these photos slide if nobody had noticed.

reply to post by halfoldman


I already knew they faked a lot of this stuff.

There was a wildlife show I had seen years ago that actually showed the tamer side of how they do things.

Like when they cut to the interior of an animals den, or an underwater shot how it is done on a set.

Made sense, I guess I never really thought how they got that amazing footage from inside the animals home.

There was a song written in the 1980's about this, by a legendary punk band Dead Kennedys.
In the lyrics to a well written song, the lemmings among other things are mentioned... Potshot heard round the world. This song is actually VERY accurate in todays world.

reply to post by halfoldman

That scene is actually one of Salmoni's tamer moments.
Pity I can't find the clip in short where he approaches a lion cub while he wades shirtless through water, and it actually cries out to its mother.
Palmer pointed out that they do flash small-print disclaimers about using some captive animals in these documentaries.
In the credits from this final scene they mention archived footage.
Why would they need archived or stock-footage for a supposed original documentary?
Are the named lions even the same throughout?

A semi-confession from 1998, by filmmaker Hugh Miles.

Rather unconvincingly Miles claims the trained animal shots are not done to save money.
www.independent.co.uk...

I find the whole argument that captive animals are used to show "natural behavior" that is supposedly too distressing for wild animals rather strange.

"I know the team involved with making this film, Mark Deeble and Vicky Stone, and they are two of the most committed film-makers you could find," said Mr Miles. "They will only have used captive animals if the piece of behaviour they needed to get would have been too stressful for the wild animals involved."

It seems to apply a wartime metaphor of sacrificing the few to save the many.
The few are then no longer worthy of a focus or rights by the common; they exist only to create an illusion for the many.
So, as the punk music video above shows, this whole issue of fakery in nature documentaries is related to a general false construction of reality.

Into the Pride (Episode 5 part 1).

Salmoni has not only lived with the pride "day and night" (I suppose they slept in his tent), but he started to look more lion-like, with a brownish beard that fits into the decontextualized tawny landscape, just like his cammo outfits.

Salmoni informs us that this pride of lions are "rogues", "cattle killers and worse" (whatever that may mean - they ate a native or two perhaps?), and eventually they are just "bad-ass".
I guess he sure taught them to change their sinful ways, like the the white ex-Marine Corps teacher who saves US inner-city kids from delinquency in cheesy American films.

As the genre demands, our bearded hunk tires of his nerdish film-crew, and claims to go out on his own to find the alpha-male lion - Brutus.
He claims to be going a little "rogue" himself, and misses no opportunity to compare himself to the lion.
Brutus is the alpha male of the pride, just as Salmoni is the alpha male of the film-crew.
It is absolutely hilarious in hindsight.

Yet, few people will question the connotations to human society, with alpha males like the image of a Biblical-looking patriarch at the top.

It seems the lions here are used to reinforce something sub-conscious in human society?

Perhaps it's true what we were discussing at a lecture this evening, and the patriarchal family (as a subjugation of females) is reproduced in all kinds of imagery and propaganda, and also in schools, prisons, the military, religion and so forth.

To find visuals of animal homosexuality, for example, one will have to turn to real footage of wildlife, and it's not on Animal Planet.

Anyway - here is Dave Salmoni, as he identifies masculine stereotypes in a construction of nature, and posits himself as a savior to reject lions (that are actually worth millions on a private game reserve):

I just watched some Animal Planet, and it is actually a disgrace.
Most of the language is about animals as enemies: monsters, beasts, invaders, stalking predators and war idioms.
And then there is the constant promo of Shark Men, which leaps onto the screen at ear-splitting volume increases, and is accompanied by music that would be more appropriate to wrestling.
It just repeats the mantra:
"Sharks. Men. Sharks. Men. Bigger sharks. Bigger Men."

This is a conceptual rape of nature, and unless people learn to decode this rubbish it will cause untold harm to an entire generation, and their relationship with what remains of nature.

There have always been a few shows on animal attacks, and man vs. nature adventures go back to the great classics in literature.
But this constant violent representation of the natural world towards humans (when the truth is mostly the other way around) is just becoming heartbreaking.
At least they could drop the conservationist pretense, and call it the The animal Movie Channel, or even more aptly, The Perils of Nature Channel.