Third Commandment: No animal shall wear clothes

The Third Commandment—'No animal shall wear clothes'—was one of the seven unalterable laws inscribed on the barn wall of Animal Farm after the Rebellion. Its origin lay in Old Major's warning that in fighting against Man, animals must not come to resemble him, and that all the habits of Man are evil. Clothing was thus defined as a mark of human tyranny, a symbol of the hierarchy that animals were to reject.

During the first flush of liberation, the animals destroyed all the trappings of human domination: the bits, the nose-rings, the whips. Snowball threw the ribbons used to decorate horses' manes onto the fire, declaring that ribbons should be considered as clothes. Boxer, the cart-horse, fetched his own straw hat and flung it onto the flames. The commandment was later simplified into the maxim 'Four legs good, two legs bad,' which the sheep learned to bleat endlessly, reinforcing the idea that anything associated with two-legged humans was to be shunned.

But the pigs themselves became the commandment's most thorough violators. Squealer was first seen walking on his hind legs across the yard, and then a long file of pigs followed, all walking upright. Napoleon emerged majestically, carrying a whip in his trotter. Soon the pigs wore Mr. Jones's clothes: Napoleon appeared in a black coat and ratcatcher breeches, and his favourite sow in Mrs. Jones's watered silk dress. At the final gathering, the animals outside the farmhouse window saw that the pigs' faces had become indistinguishable from those of the human farmers—the boundary the Third Commandment had tried to preserve had collapsed entirely.

The breaking of the Third Commandment was not an isolated act but the visible sign of a deeper transformation. The pigs, who had assumed leadership, took for themselves the milk, the apples, the beer, and the beds. Squealer justified every privilege with statistics showing that food production had increased by hundreds of per cent, though the animals themselves worked longer hours and ate less than in Jones's day. The farm grew richer, but the ordinary animals remained hungry, cold, and overworked. The rule against wearing clothes had been a promise that animals would not become like the humans who exploited them; its violation marked the moment when the pigs had fully assumed the role of the oppressors they had overthrown.