About Lemmings

For the benefit of the ‘people’ over on the Chinese Forums, here is a post about lemmings. Note that this is not a post about Han Chinese, although if you choose to believe that it is, then be my guest. China might not be a free country, but this is a free blog, and the MyLaowai Central Committee has ruled that readers may interpret this post in whichever manner they like.

The Private Life of Lemmings.

A lemming is a small, weak animal of the rodent family that exists primarily to eat, shit, reproduce, and make a lot of high-pitched noises. They look rather cute from a distance, but up close their buck teeth and nasty smell is actually rather offensive. They are closely related to rats, and like rats, will eat just about anything at all (including things that other animals wouldn’t even consider food).

The behavior of lemmings is much the same as that of many other rodents which have periodic population booms and then disperse in all directions, seeking the food and shelter that their natural environment cannot provide, because it has all been used up.

Every few years (in human terms, every couple of decades or so), lemmings mass for invasions of neighboring habitats. Their behaviour grows ever more violent and they begin the march to conquer as much of the world as they can. Individuals who don’t go along with the herd are either killed, or trampled in the mad rush. The lemmings keep on going until they are finally stopped by natural barriers, or as we humans would say, by reality. The fact is, that the entire world really has no desire to be over-run by lemmings, and nature has cleverly arranged it so that the lemmings themselves are incapable of becoming the dominant mammal species on the planet.

It has been observed that the behaviour of lemmings whilst on the march is similar in outward repects to what we humans would call bravery, but that is misleading - if indeed lemmings could be said to have bravery, then it is the bravey of the mob. Individual lemmings are in fact notoriously weak and chickenshit, running from any and all fights with other animals. Attempts to anthropomorphise the animal are in any event flawed, as lemmings do not possess human emotions such as love, pity, compassion, or other feelings.

That said, let us not judge the lemming too harshly - after all, they are just being lemmings, doing the only thing that they know how to do.

I think there’s something in that for all of us, don’t you?