The Seven Commandments, inscribed on the tarred wall of the big barn in the first flush of the Rebellion, were intended as an unalterable law. They began with the seventh and most resonant principle: "All animals are equal." That declaration, spoken by Old Major in his foundational speech, had been the cornerstone of Animalism, the revolutionary creed that promised a society free from tyranny and hierarchy. The commandments were written in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away, and the animals nodded in complete agreement.

But the commandments proved less permanent than the paint that held them. Over time, the pigs manipulated the text to serve their expanding power. The Fourth Commandment, originally forbidding any animal to sleep in a bed, was silently amended to "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." The Sixth Commandment, "No animal shall kill any other animal," acquired the crucial qualifier "without cause." The Fifth Commandment, "No animal shall drink alcohol," was softened to "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess." Each modification was so subtly introduced that the animals, who could not read well, remembered only the original wording and accepted the new versions as if they had always been there.

The final and most devastating revision came near the end of the story. The pigs had begun walking on their hind legs, an act that symbolically erased the boundary between animal and human. Soon after, Clover and Benjamin, the two oldest survivors of the Rebellion, made their way to the end wall of the big barn. The white lettering that had once held the Seven Commandments was gone. In its place stood a single sentence: "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." Benjamin read it aloud, breaking his usual silence. The words openly codified the hierarchy that had long been practiced: the pigs were now avowedly superior to all other animals, and the original dream of equality was dead.

This final commandment was the logical endpoint of the pigs' gradual seizure of power. It transformed the revolutionary ideal from a promise of universal justice into a justification for oppression. The pigs, who had once taught that "whatever goes upon four legs is a friend," now walked on two legs, carried whips, wore clothes, and lived in the farmhouse. The distinction between pig and human had collapsed. By rewriting the fundamental law, the pigs declared themselves the arbiters of equality, defining it not as a condition of all but as a privilege of the few.

The animals, huddled in the yard, watched the line of pigs march past. The sheep, who had been trained to bleat a new slogan, burst into "Four legs good, two legs better!" The moment of potential protest was drowned in the ovine chorus. Clover, her old eyes failing, could only stand beside Benjamin. The farm that had been won at such cost had become a place where the strongest rule, and the law itself proclaimed the inequality it had been created to abolish.