Mr. Jones's capability

Mr. Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, had once been a capable farmer whose harshness was matched by his competence. In earlier years, though he was a hard master, the farm was productive. However, after losing money in a lawsuit, he became disheartened and turned to excessive drinking. He spent whole days lounging in the kitchen, reading newspapers and drinking, occasionally feeding Moses on crusts of bread soaked in beer. His men grew idle and dishonest, fields became overrun with weeds, buildings needed roofing, hedges were neglected, and the animals were chronically underfed. This decline, which left the animals hungry and desperate, created the conditions for the Rebellion.

The animals' memory of Jones's rule was a catalogue of misery and brutal exploitation. Old Major articulated the universal condition: lives were miserable, laborious, and short; animals were worked to the last atom of strength and slaughtered at the end of their usefulness. The tools of this oppression—the whips, the cruel knives used to castrate pigs and lambs, the dog-chains, the nose-rings, the bits and halters—were kept in the harness-room. When the Rebellion succeeded, the animals' first act was to destroy these implements, flinging them down the well or onto a rubbish fire, capering with joy as the whips went up in flames. Snowball declared that ribbons, like clothes, were marks of human beings, and Boxer added his straw hat to the fire.

After the Rebellion, the animals worked hard but for themselves, and at first they were happier. Yet by the second year of pig rule, the situation had become eerily similar to Jones's time. To rebuild the windmill with walls twice as thick, the animals worked even harder than before, and there were days when they felt they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done under Jones. Squealer read out figures proving huge increases in production, but the animals could no longer remember conditions before the Rebellion with any clarity. The farm grew richer, yet the common animals remained hungry and overworked while the pigs and dogs prospered. The pigs consumed the milk and apples that the others had assumed would be shared equally, and later they took the windfall apples and the main crop for themselves.

The pigs' manipulation of the Seven Commandments reflected the erosion of the original ideals and the return of the same exploitative patterns. The Commandments were rewritten: the Fourth Commandment became "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets"; the Fifth became "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess"; the Sixth became "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." Eventually, only one Commandment remained: "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." The animals' faulty memory and the absence of any written record of earlier resolutions, as Squealer pointed out, made it impossible to contest the changes. Under Jones, they had been slaves; under Napoleon, they were still slaves, though the whip was now carried by a pig.