Hen Rebellion

In late January, as the winter food shortage deepened, Napoleon announced through Squealer that the hens must surrender their eggs. He had accepted a contract with Mr. Whymper for four hundred eggs a week, the proceeds of which would purchase grain to sustain the farm until summer. The hens had been warned this sacrifice might be necessary, but they had not believed it would come to pass.

The hens, who were just preparing their clutches for the spring sitting, raised a terrible outcry, calling the forced surrender of their eggs murder. Led by three young Black Minorca pullets, they launched the first rebellion since the expulsion of Jones. They flew up to the rafters and laid their eggs there, so that the eggs smashed to pieces on the floor, thwarting collection.

Napoleon responded swiftly and ruthlessly. He ordered the hens' rations to be stopped and decreed that any animal caught giving even a single grain of corn to a hen would be punished by death. The dogs enforced these orders. For five days the hens held out, but then they capitulated and returned to their nesting boxes.

Nine hens had died during the standoff. Their bodies were buried in the orchard, and it was announced that they had died of coccidiosis. Mr. Whymper heard nothing of the affair, and the eggs were duly delivered, a grocer's van coming to the farm once a week to take them away.

The Hen Rebellion marked a turning point: it was the first open resistance to Napoleon's rule, and it was crushed with a ruthlessness that prefigured the later executions. The pigs' readiness to starve their own kind and to use the dogs as enforcers demonstrated how far the regime had already departed from the principles of Animalism.