Through a process known as “laughing all the way to the bank”, I’d imagine.
Let’s be fair to Walt&Co, though. Whoever was in charge of that particular film may have firmly believed that lemmings are suicidal. Doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t. Lemmings will die off at an amazing rate if their numbers exceed the local environment’s ability to support them, and maybe that’s what started the folktales about lemming suicides. Only problem with this theory is that lots of furry little critters will die off at an amazing rate etc. etc. But nobody talks about field mice hurling themselves off cliffs.
And finally, because I just can’t resist saying this, I know someone who was bit by a lemming once.
Well, Janx, you might go check out http://www.snopes.com’s debunking of the lemming myth. They say that the Disney “documentary” doesn’t show “shitloads of little lemmings” but only a handful in any one shot. So, you might want to review your copy of that documentary.
It is certainly possible that the filmmakers believed the lemming migration/suicide story was true, but knew they couldn’t wait years and years and years to photograph a real one, so they “staged” one for the cameras under better conditions (better lighting, ability to get great camera angles, etc.) It is also possible that they knew it was all hoax.
The question of whether Walt himself knew it was faked is, as far as I know, still open.
Now, on suicides:
It seems to me that if we eliminate “unnatural stress” as a cause of suicidal behaviour, we’ve elminated human suicides as well. I mean, as Doug posed the initial scenario, “do otherwise healthy and reproductively-capable individuals of any other species perform actions foreseeably guaranteed to result in their immediate death?” One argue, certainly, that otherwise healthy humans don’t commit suicide either.
Well, I don’t have one handy, but I remember specifically
them showing close ups of just 8-10 at a time, sniffing around and then being pushed on by the unseen hoards behind
them…I do remember though, the shots of them falling off a cliff, it did not show a mass of little bodies pouring over the edge from a far, it showed a “held frame” with little bodies passing (very fast) from the top to the bottom,(think watching the rain from inside a box)
obviously, they shot it once then spliced lots of copies
togeather to give the impression that it was an ongoing
flow of dare devil lemmings.
This left a BIG Impression because we had hamsters at the time. (sniff sniff)
I also remember thinking, “jeez that looks cheezy”, and at the same time “jeez, that looks like Jasper and all his lil bros. and sisters”
I have never gotten over this fully, It scarred me for
life, now to learn that after years and years of psychothearapy, and a dreaded fear of high places to boot,
it was all “trick photography”, a cruel hoax!
in correction to one suggestion, i’m nobody’s entymologist.
but it IS true that if continue to add limiting clauses, then we can eliminate all the counter-examples. it’s like an inverted version of that old method for eliminating crime: make everything legal.
it seems it kinda misses the point. all due respect to Mr. Adams rephrasing, and the suggested addendum, but I read the question as an attempt to challenge our heritage of anthropocentric folklore, the type that tries to pretend that we’re not really anything like any other species on this planet, then proceeds to note either:
A) how happy
or
B) how sad
(this seems an example of the latter)
do we and other species experience traumatic conditions which push our behaviours towards self-destruction? yes, and in tidily analagous ways.
i doubt as many animals kill themselves over losing a mate or a job, but you have to attribute that to a unique social environment. you might even go so far as to presume that if animals had a social structure precisely like ours, they might behave likewise.
but this is probably just the skinner talking,
i’ve really got to get that bastard out of my head.
<< all due respect to Mr. Adams rephrasing, and the suggested addendum >>
Er, thomas, please note that this is a Staff Report, written by Straight Dope Staff Doug (our resident entomologist) and not by Cecil Adams.
The question does hinge around, what do you mean by “suicide”? Does a mother pheasant luring a predator away from the next count as “suicidal”? One could argue that zebras are all suicidal – their survival trick is to have a large herd so that predators can pick off a few but not the whole herd. Doug chose his definitions fairly carefully, neither trying to prove nor disprove any particular comparsion of humans to animals, but to be able to answer the question.
It’s obviously a continuum. At the one end, you define suicide as “shooting oneself in the head after leaving a guilt-laden note behind”, in which case no non-human deaths would qualify. At the other end, you define suicide in such broad terms that you include a sick animal who stops eating (where the loss of appetite is a symptom of the disease). Doug chose to draw a clear line.
From some of the comments here, I think what this is all boiling down to is whether you consider suicidal emotional depression to be a disease or not. I realize there is a thin line at best between psychology and biochemistry, but I (and, I think, most scientists who study behavior) refuse to believe that ALL suicidal humans are driven to it by chemical imbalances (inlcuding those that can be induced by stress) in their brains. If you’re going to claim that any human who would contemplate suicide must be insane, and insanity is a disease, then you’re getting into circular reasoning and subjectivity. There are human beings who have NOTHING physically or biochemically wrong with them who still kill themselves. That is the line I am drawing between humans and other animals; we simply have no evidence that non-humans ever cross that line.
I understand your distinction, Doug, and I agree with it; however, it is unlikely that any human being commits suicide without some stress. Clinical depression is a disease, but not all suicides are from clinical depression.
And the discussion was moving in the direction of excluding “artificially induced stress”, which is where I was wondering at what point the line is drawn so as to make the discussion meaningless.
Someone I know is in an environmental philosophy course, and just last week they were discussing this topic. They were discussing the value of animal vs. human life, and one person said that animals don’t have feelings and do not commit suicide. Another girl in the class was quite certain that they can, as she was raised on a farm. She personally had seen, and knew other people who had seen horses committing suicide by refusing to eat. It occurred on her farm when one of their horses suffered a serious injury and died. The other horse who had been raised with it since birth then became, for want of another word, “depressed” and refused to eat and became lethargic. It refused to move or interact with others and eventually died. I think for an animal, no longer eating would forseeably result in death.
In the Philippines, the “Maya”, a local sparrow-like bird that feeds on seeds, rice and fruits, has been documented to kill itself when placed inside a cage (usually by not eating or squeezing itself senseless into cage corners).
This “heroic trait” is the reason why the small bird is featured in the haunting song “Bayan Ko” (“My Nation”)
“Ibon na may layang lumipad
kulungin mo at umiiyak”
“Bird with the freedom to fly,
cage it and it will cry”
Well, crying and dying are two different things, but hey, the gist is there…
And about them whale beachings, one of the theories that I know of, aside from pollution, sudden sea disturbances and extreme chemical changes in the water, is sonar activity.
There have been instances wherein sea trials or navy excercises involving the use of sonar equipment preceded a lot of whale beachings (Gee, can’t remember where I read this. Try Jane’s or Discovery). The presence of an oceanwide sonar sea bed array (an example is the SOSSUS line) used to detect ex-Soviet boomers in both the Pacific and Atlantic may also have contributed to whale beachings. While originally passive, some of the arrays have the capability to go active in order to “ping” subs running on silent.
Again, I believe that this is not the only reason for beachings. Sonar may however have been responsible for several to occur. Since whales operate mostly on sonar, and can detect sounds well over several hundred miles away, its logical that some go bonkers and blindly follow their pod leader when they’re bombarded by several thousand watts worth of sonar energy.
I disagree. This implies that everything is known about the human condition. Patently not so, especially speaking biochemically. Any newsservice on the net is constantly coming out with articles about such and such new discovery and the signicance of whatever and the inter-play of this and that bio-substance, genetic sequence, whatever.
More correct to state that there are human beings who have nothing physically or biochemically wrong that we can detect with our present level of knowledge and technology, sometimes kill themselves.
IMO, anybody who kills themselves has something wrong, internally, chemically. Happy, healthy people don’t have the prerequisite world view necessary for suicide, unless it is to save another person. In which case, it is usually not premeditated.
clinically depressed and searching for ways to fix it…
“More correct to state that there are human beings who have nothing physically or biochemically wrong that we can detect with our present level of knowledge and technology, sometimes kill themselves.”
I’d contend that you are thinking about this emotionally and not rationally, and denying that some of human psychology is NOT biochemical. Look at it this way: in order for you to be right, there has to be some particular undetectable biochemical profile that is unique to people who commit suicide. Remember, virtually every human being in existence is depressed at some point in their lives, and quite likely a majority of people contemplate suicide at one point or another. Yet only a vanishingly small number actually do commit suicide. Your hypothesis implies that those people have something the rest of us don’t. It is far more rational to suppose that there is very little actual variation in biochemistry from one human to another, and that the variation that is important in determining who kills themselves and who does not is purely psychological with NO unique biochemical trigger. I don’t think there are any psychologists who will buy the theory that 100% of human psychology is biochemically determined, which is basically what you are implying. Sort of like claiming that there’s a biochemical reason for liking or hating Britney Spears.
If I might be so bold to state an opinion I didn’t cover in the original answer, it’s clear that human beings are no longer subject to natural selection (nor are domestic animals or lab animals), so whatever genetic basis there might be towards suicide is NOT going to be selected against the way it would in any wild animal species - and this may be the core of the difference. Healthy wild animals committing suicide is a freakishly rare thing compared to humans, rare enough to be considered totally anomalous and effectively nonexistent, and there’s a good evolutionary explanation for that.
You are correct in the first part. As to the second, investing emotion in a subject does not preclude also investing reason. This is an area I have involved myself in for several years now. (On a non-professional level- I am not a mental health professional, but a person with mental health issues. Still, as there are advantages to being an observing clinician, there are also “advantages”, so to speak, in actually having the problems- both sides can contribute good data.)
Not necessarily “unique”, but yes, ‘different’ from the majority of people who don’t suicide. There are many virii that cause the constellation of symptoms we refer to as a ‘cold’. And they affect different people in different ways. This is due to different physical makeups on the part of the people. My point is that the ‘same’ end result, a ‘cold’ results from many different causes. And It wasn’t so long ago that we could not see the generic cause, (virus) let alone the small differences in the generic causes. (The differences between virii.)
As to the ‘undetectable’ part- yes, that’s what I’m saying, only I’m qualifying- PRESENTLY undetectable.
I’m afraid I was a little too sketchy in my post above-
Yes, people kill themselves for psychological reasons. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as ‘purely psychological’. It’s a very intricate balance between teh ‘psychological’ end of things and the ‘biochemical’, or ‘physical’ aspect. These two constantly affect each other. I submit though, that psychological situations affect biochemical situations, which in turn affect the psychological situations which in turn affect etc. I further argue that in this feedback cycle, the physical, biochemical is the more basic or dominant of the two regarding how we feel, what we do whether or not we suicide. The psychological and biochemical are results of eahc other, but the psychological is more of a result of the biochemical than is the biochemical a result of the psychological.
And yes, I agree that there is ‘very little variation from one human to another’. That, in part, is my point. But in fact, there is variation. So, if one person kills him/herself in a given situation, and another doesn’t, isn’t it reasonable to search out answers in these little variations? And isn’t current research findin more and more that the biochemical is the basis for the psychological?
Qualifying with my above statement, yes, that is what I’m implying. Saying you don’t think there are any psychologists etc, to me, is specious. And psychologists are not the only players in this arena. (re my statements above about clinical observers and people who actually have whatever is being clinically observed both having good input to contribute.)
Genes, basically, can be considered to be made up of biocompounds. A genetic profile, in broad terms, can be said to influence a psychological profile. Pyschological profiles, on the other hand, have not been shown to have affect on genetic profiles. To me, this bolsters my argument above.
I still stand by my (hopefully fleshed-out) arguments.
-Not every thing is known about the various human conditions. Your statement above implies the converse.
-It is premature and incorrect to say that there are people who suicide who have NOTHING wrong with them. More correct to say that people who suicide have something wrong with them that we cannot presently detect.
In terms of animals who are seriously injured or ill and don’t eat, wasting away, I think it would be injudicious to anthropomorphise this behaviour. I had a friend in the last stages of cancer, and he had no appetite. He wasn’t trying to starve himself to death, the disease affected his appetite. Thus, I’m not sure that an injured horse refusing to eat is “suicidal” in the way that Doug had defined it.
But a chain of causation linking biochemical states with behaviour, behaviour with effects on environment, and biochemical effects with perception of environmental impact doesn’t seem unreasonable. My mental state combined with the eddies of contingency may produce a state of ‘liking Britany Spears’. Without a ghost in the machine, this would mean that ‘liking BS’ linked to a peculiar biochemical state although it wouldn’t mean that that state was caused internally in any meaningful way.
And FWIW I think the criterion for suicide is intention not foresight.
Again, I must apologize for being sketchy above. I left out one final argument, the omission of which, I feel, greatly detracts from my position. Please mentally insert the following text, enclosed in parentheses between where I stop addressing Doug’s statements and address AW’s statement.
Again, I must apologize for being sketchy above. I left out one final argument, the omission of which, I feel, greatly detracts from my position. Please mentally insert the following text, enclosed in parentheses, between where I stop addressing Doug’s statements and address AW’s statement.
“So there. nyaah nyaa nyaa nyaa nyaa”.
Oh, ps, liking or not liking Britney Spears is quite different from deciding whether or not to suicide. I submit that the internal conditons in these two situations are also quite different. Also, that along with environment and experience, genetics are going to often influence, to some degree, one’s sexual/romantic attractions. But again, the converse has not been shown to be the case, ie. that having a crush on BS will change your genes. (Although crush/non-crush status will affect the current bio-chemical status of one’s brain. The interdependancy of the physical/psychological I spoke of above.)
my sincere apologies to doug and all, i shall try to mind my quotes and references.
correction: the starving rats had nothing to do with chemical imbalances, they were part of a learned helplessness study. but it seems we admit to the existence of suicide-inducing chemical imbalances shared by some humans and some animals. humans and animals share a suicide-inducing state, point would be settled if it weren’t for the amorphous nature of our definition.
we all agree that there are many teneble definitions for suicide, though we may disagree on each definition’s relevance to this discussion.
the one originally suggested is as follows:
1)a proper definition should be testable, so we can measure potential counter-examples against it. without testability no debate can occur. if this definition is testable, give me the criteria you require when i suggest a counter-example. how might i attest to the animal’s will and foresight?
2)the definition should be no more restrictive of animals than it is when applied to humans. i agree that a line must be drawn somewhere, but it’s unfair to draw two separate standards, one for humans and one for other individuals.
this is seen in the rat study. if humans and rats share a similar response to similar surroundings, and we label one group “suicidal,” how is it fair to dismiss that label for the other?
as an extension of this, how is it health became a prerequisite for suicide? merriam webster makes no mention of this bizarre prereq… maybe someone can check the O.E.D. for me. granted, merriam webster isn’t the most academic of sources, but just because a person is sick or sterile and takes their own life, it doesn’t escape the label of “suicide” for me. should it? the article admits that some whale beachings would be an apparent counter-example if not for this point, so it seems important enough.
