sparrow

The sparrows first appear in the narrative as winged creatures, and thus, under Old Major's original classification, they are friends. In the early days after the Rebellion, the cat, who had joined the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee, was seen sitting on a roof talking to some sparrows just out of her reach. She told them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw. But the sparrows kept their distance. This incident is a small but telling instance of the failure of the pigs' attempts to re-educate the wild creatures; the sparrows' instinctive wariness proved stronger than the ideological appeal.

Later, when Snowball reduced the Seven Commandments to the single maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad," the birds initially objected because they had two legs. Snowball, however, argued that a bird's wing is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation, and should therefore be regarded as a leg. Thus sparrows, like all birds, were reclassified as four-legged, preserving the ideological purity of the slogan. This redefinition demonstrates how the pigs manipulated language to fit their political needs, and the sparrows' earlier refusal to trust the cat's invitation suggests that the wild creatures, unlike the more gullible farm animals, were not easily co-opted.

By the end of the novel, the pigs have fully adopted human habits, walking on their hind legs, wearing clothes, and using whips. The final Commandment reads "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." The sparrows are not seen again, but the principles that once defined them as friends have been discarded. The farm's green flag, once bearing a hoof and horn, is now plain green. The sparrows' instinctive distance from the cat's overture was a small early warning of the revolution's betrayal; they had, in a sense, already understood that the new regime's promises were not to be trusted.