Only pigs put forward resolutions

After the Rebellion, the pigs naturally assumed leadership. On Sunday mornings, after the hoisting of the green flag, all animals gathered in the big barn for the Meeting. There, the work of the coming week was planned and resolutions were put forward and debated. It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions. The other animals, though they could vote, never thought of any resolutions of their own. This pattern was not accidental; Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer had elaborated Old Major's teachings into a complete system called Animalism, and they were the only ones capable of expounding its principles. The other animals—the horses, sheep, and hens—accepted the pigs as their teachers and absorbed everything they were told. Thus, from the earliest days of the farm, the power to set the political agenda belonged exclusively to the pigs.

Over time, the pigs reinforced this monopoly through ideological simplification and the use of force. Snowball reduced the Seven Commandments to the single maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad," which the sheep were taught to bleat at crucial moments, drowning out any debate. Squealer, the persuasive talker, later explained away every change in policy—from the pigs' consumption of milk and apples to the abolition of the Sunday Meetings—by appealing to the animals' desire to keep Jones away. The pigs also created a mystique of work: they claimed to spend their days on "files," "reports," and "memoranda," which were burned after being covered with writing, and this was presented as essential to the farm's welfare. Although the pigs never produced food by their own labor, they received the best rations, while the other animals worked harder than ever but were often hungry. By the end, the pigs had even learned to walk on their hind legs, wore clothes, and carried whips. When visiting farmers looked at the pigs, it was impossible to tell which was which. The rule that only pigs could put forward resolutions had been a small step toward this complete erasure of the ideal of equality.