Fifth Commandment: No animal shall drink alcohol

The Fifth Commandment—"No animal shall drink alcohol"—originated in Old Major's foundational speech, where he declared that in fighting against Man, animals must not adopt his vices, explicitly listing alcohol among the forbidden habits of humanity. When Snowball inscribed the Seven Commandments on the tarred wall of the big barn, this prohibition stood as a categorical rule meant to shield the new society from the corruptions of the old. The animals, most of whom could not read, accepted the Commandments as an unalterable law, and the prohibition seemed as permanent as the wall itself. The pigs, who had elaborated Animalism from Major's teachings, initially enforced this and the other Commandments with apparent rigor; during the early days of the Rebellion, Boxer kicked in the barrel of beer in the scullery, and the farmhouse itself was preserved untouched as a museum, reinforcing the ban on alcohol and other human goods.

The rule, however, was always vulnerable to the pigs' capacity for reinterpretation. The Commandments were written in white paint and could be physically altered, and the pigs controlled literacy. The first textual modification occurred after the Whisky Incident, when the pigs discovered a case of whisky in the farmhouse cellars. That night, Napoleon was seen wearing Mr. Jones's bowler hat and galloping around the yard, and the farmhouse echoed with drunken singing that mixed the strains of Beasts of England with the pigs' revelry. The next morning, Squealer announced that Comrade Napoleon was dying, and as his last act he had decreed that the drinking of alcohol was to be punished by death. Yet by evening Napoleon had recovered, and soon he ordered the purchase of booklets on brewing and distilling. Shortly afterward, Muriel discovered that the Fifth Commandment on the wall now read "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess"—the words "to excess" having been added, as the animals gradually learned, to justify the pigs' consumption. The modification was typical of the pigs' technique: the letter of the law was preserved while its spirit was gutted, and the animals, whose memories had been softened by Squealer's constant reassurances, accepted that they had simply misremembered the original wording.

In the final years of the farm, the prohibition on alcohol was rendered meaningless. The pigs received daily rations of beer—a pint for ordinary pigs, half a gallon for Napoleon himself, served in the Crown Derby soup tureen. The barley field, once intended as a retirement pasture for superannuated animals, was sown with barley for the pigs' brewing. On the night of the memorial banquet for Boxer, a grocer's van delivered a wooden crate, and the farmhouse erupted in uproarious singing, a violent quarrel, and the crash of glass; the pigs had acquired another case of whisky. The rule that had once been a founding principle of Animalism became a dead letter, maintained only as a rhetorical threat against the lower animals. The fullest symbolic collapse came when the pigs began walking on their hind legs, carrying whips, and wearing Mr. Jones's clothes—including Napoleon's black coat, ratcatcher breeches, and leather leggings. At the final dinner party with the neighboring farmers, the pigs drank beer and played cards; the human guests toasted the prosperity of the farm, now renamed The Manor Farm. The animals outside the window saw that the faces of the pigs had become indistinguishable from those of the men. The Fifth Commandment had been, in effect, erased: the pigs had not only adopted alcohol but had become the very thing the Commandment was meant to prevent.