The animals' gravity method

The construction of the windmill confronted the animals of Animal Farm with their first major technical obstacle. The farm had a limestone quarry, sand, and cement, but the animals could not break the stone into usable pieces because no animal could stand on its hind legs to wield a pick or crowbar. After weeks of fruitless attempts, the idea of using gravity occurred to someone. Huge boulders too large to be used directly were scattered across the quarry floor. The animals lashed ropes around them and, pulling together—cows, horses, sheep, and even pigs at critical moments—dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry. There they were toppled over the edge, shattering into smaller fragments below.

Transporting the broken stone was comparatively simple. The horses carried it in cartloads, the sheep dragged single blocks, and even Muriel and Benjamin yoked themselves into an old governess-cart to contribute. By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and the building of the windmill began under the pigs' supervision. The gravity method was a testament to the animals' collective ingenuity and their willingness to undertake immense physical labor for the common good. Yet it also foreshadowed the relentless toil that would characterize the farm's subsequent years. The animals worked like slaves, but they were happy, believing their efforts were for their own benefit and for future generations.

The method's reliance on brute collective force and the pigs' inability to use human tools underscored a crucial irony. The very revolution that had overthrown human tyranny was now subjecting the animals to a regime of labor that was, in many respects, as harsh as the one they had escaped. Old Major had described their former lives as "miserable, laborious, and short," but now, under the banner of the windmill, they worked a sixty-hour week, with voluntary Sunday labor enforced by half-rations, and food supplies dwindled. The pigs, who directed the work, justified their own privileged consumption of milk and apples as necessary for brainworkers, using Squealer's propaganda to turn every sacrifice into a triumph. The gravity method, a clever solution born of necessity, thus became part of the machinery that gradually eroded the animals' equality—a process that culminated in the pigs walking on their hind legs, and ultimately, as the animals outside the farmhouse window observed, it became impossible to say which was pig and which was man.