Unequal Treatment In Animal Farm

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It is not seen very often in popular books today that a pig instructs nine killer puppies to tear out the throats of traitorous hens. In Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire of major European countries in the 1940’s, this is only one of the events that displays the leading pig Napoleon’s road to complete takeover. Napoleon mainly succeeds in his path to glory through the inequality of his “subjects.” Orwell expresses the theme of unequal treatment in society through the citizenry of the pigs, hens, and dogs in his story. Orwell explains the idea of inequality throughout a society through his hen characters in the story. For example, when the hens’ eggs are being taken away: “One Sunday morning Squealer announced that the hens, who had just …show more content…
Nobody is really “equal” enough to see what is going on during Napoleon’s business deals. The only animals besides the other pigs that are any form of “equal” to their Leader Comrade Napoleon are the puppies that had been previously taken away. Societal inequality is equally explained through the treatment of Orwell’s dog characters in the story. For example, when the dogs are taken away from their Jessie and Bluebell: “As soon as they were weaned, Napoleon took them away from their mothers, saying that he would make himself responsible for their education. He took them up into a loft which could only be reached by a ladder from the harness-room, and there kept them in such seclusion that the rest of the farm soon forgot their existence.” What happens at this event is very intriguing, as the reader assumes that they will be educated as the rest of the animals; what is not realized is that only the pigs can climb the ladder, and this therefore provides a sort of unspoken inequality of the event. When the dogs are later trained to be the pigs’ …show more content…
One example would be when the patriotic song of Animal Farm was changed: “He announced that, by a special decree of Comrade Napoleon, Beasts of England had been abolished. From now onwards it was forbidden to sing it…[a considerable length later]…the general feeling on the farm was well expressed in a poem entitled ‘Comrade Napoleon’, which was composed by Minimus…” Beasts of England represented the ideology and needs of the entire farm and represented each animal equally. “Comrade Napoleon,” however, only glorifies Napoleon alone, and outwardly places him superior to all other animals. Another example of when the pigs took their superiority too much was when several of the rules were changed: “It ran: ‘No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.’ Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.” What the animals didn’t realize was that they would have to follow whatever rule changes the pigs had made, as none of the other animals had the superiority or status to argue. The pigs continued to assert their dominance and show the other animals their inferior place by messing with the rules as they pleased. A final prime example of when the pigs asserted their power was when the apples and milk had disappeared:

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