Talk about unnecessary cruelty, lemmings are quite cute creatures, can't imagine what was going thru their heads ("the Disney filmmakers") when they threw all those lemmings off a cliff to their deaths for a film.
I had an environmental ethics professor in college. Her pet cause was the plight of the atlantic bluefin tuna. She frequently lamented that only the cute animals get any real support.
If you're going to eat salmon anyway (and lots of people do), it's much less destructive to eat it factory farmed. This actually goes for every single fish.
Even animals react to it. A live and let live attitude (if not one of protectiveness) towards harmless/cute living things is perfectly healthy it seems.
Cruelty was par for the course when it came to nature documentaries unfortunately. Most nature documentaries of the past were staged. One of the most infamous one was where they would trap and drug jaguars and them dump them on the riverbank and wait for caimans to kill it.
Notice how the jaguar can't move from that spot even with a bunch of large caiman right in front of it? It's almost like one of the jaguar's paws were pinned down to keep it in one spot. Wonder why? Could it be cameras were heavy and clunky contraptions back then that you could realistically focus on one area at a time? Can't capture jaguar footage if the jaguar is allowed to move out of frame. Or it was drugged so much that it had no idea what was going on.
The most important attribute for animal rights causes it seems. If Facebook campaigns are any measure...