Second Commandment: Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend

The Second Commandment emerged from Old Major's final speech to the assembled animals, delivered in the big barn on the night before his death. In that address, Major laid out the central principle of Animalism: "Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend." The rule was meant to create an unbreachable division between the animal kingdom and humanity, demanding total enmity toward Man and absolute solidarity among all non-human creatures. When the pigs later codified Major's teachings into the Seven Commandments, this leg-based classification was inscribed as the second article, painted in white letters on the tarred wall of the barn. It was to be an unalterable law, a crisp binary that every animal, even the least intelligent, could grasp and defend.

Snowball, the most intellectually inventive of the pigs, soon recognized that the stupider animals—the sheep, hens, and ducks—could not memorize the full Commandments. He therefore condensed the entire ideology into a single maxim: "Four legs good, two legs bad." This reduction, he argued, captured the essential principle of Animalism and would protect every animal from human influence. The birds initially objected, pointing out that they too had two legs, but Snowball proved to his own satisfaction that a bird's wing was "an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation" and should therefore be regarded as a leg. The birds accepted the explanation, and the maxim was inscribed above the Commandments in larger letters. The sheep, in particular, adopted the chant with fanatical enthusiasm, using it to drown out dissent at crucial moments. The Second Commandment, in its simplified form, became the ideological weapon that silenced debate and enforced uniformity—a tool the pigs would later wield against the very animals it was meant to protect.

Years later, the commandment was shattered by the very creatures who had created it. One evening, after the sheep had been taught a new song in secret, the animals returned to the yard to find Squealer walking on his hind legs, awkwardly but with perfect balance. A long file of pigs followed, all upright, and finally Napoleon himself emerged, majestically erect, a whip in his trotter. The sight was a direct violation of the Second Commandment: the pigs were now walking on two legs, the defining mark of the enemy. The terrified animals, huddling together, might have protested, but the sheep immediately burst into a new chant: "Four legs good, two legs better!" The old binary had been officially inverted. The pigs, by adopting the posture of humans, had crossed the boundary that the commandment was supposed to guard. The whip in Napoleon's trotter—an instrument of human tyranny—completed the betrayal.

In the final scene of the novel, a delegation of neighboring farmers joined the pigs for a card game and a toast in the farmhouse. The animals outside peered through the window and saw that the faces of the pigs had begun to resemble those of the men. When a quarrel erupted over a card game, twelve voices shouted in anger, and the observers could no longer tell pig from man. The Second Commandment had been negated not only by the pigs' physical posture but by their full assimilation into human society. The classification that was supposed to unite all animals against Man had been turned into a license for the pigs to become Man. The commandment's promise of friendship among four-legged creatures was revealed as a rhetorical fiction, sustained only as long as it served the interests of the ruling pigs.