The terror

The terror began on a late afternoon, four days after the fabrications about Snowball's nocturnal sabotage had saturated the farm. Napoleon, wearing both his newly self-awarded medals, emerged from the farmhouse with his nine huge dogs frisking around him, their growls sending shivers through the assembled animals. The animals cowered silently, knowing in advance that some terrible thing was about to happen. Napoleon uttered a high-pitched whimper, and immediately the dogs bounded forward, seizing the four young porkers by the ear and dragging them, squealing and bleeding, to his feet. The dogs tasted blood and for a few moments appeared to go mad; three of them even flung themselves upon Boxer, who caught one in mid-air and pinned it to the ground. Napoleon ordered Boxer to release the dog, and the animal slunk away, bruised and howling.

The four young porkers—the same ones who had protested when the Sunday Meetings were abolished—then confessed without any prompting. They admitted to having been secretly in touch with Snowball since his expulsion, to collaborating with him in destroying the windmill, and to entering into an agreement to hand over Animal Farm to Mr. Frederick. They added that Snowball had privately admitted to being Jones's secret agent for years. When they finished, the dogs tore their throats out. Napoleon demanded whether any other animal had anything to confess. The three Black Minorca pullets, who had been ringleaders in the egg rebellion, came forward, stating that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey. They were slaughtered. The goose confessed to secreting six ears of corn and eating them in the night; a sheep confessed to urinating in the drinking pool, urged by Snowball; two other sheep confessed to murdering an old ram by chasing him around a bonfire when he had a cough. All were slain on the spot. The pile of corpses grew before Napoleon's feet, and the air grew heavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown on the farm since the expulsion of Jones.

The terror did not end with that single afternoon of executions. It became a permanent state, enforced by the dogs and sustained by the constant demonization of Snowball. Squealer announced that Snowball had been Jones's secret agent from the very beginning, and that his bravery at the Battle of the Cowshed was a ruse designed to lure the animals to their doom. The animals' memories were systematically rewritten, and the cult of Napoleon intensified. He was no longer simply "Napoleon" but "our Leader, Comrade Napoleon," credited with every success, and a poem composed by Minimus, titled "Comrade Napoleon," was inscribed on the barn wall. The terror was the mechanism by which the revolution devoured its own children, and it laid the groundwork for the complete transformation of Animal Farm into a replica of the human tyranny it had overthrown.

The terror's lasting legacy was the subversion of the very principles the rebellion had been founded on. The Sixth Commandment was quietly altered to permit killing "without cause." In later years, the pigs would walk on their hind legs, wear clothes, and carry whips; Napoleon himself would stroll in the garden with a pipe and eventually appear in Mr. Jones's black coat and ratcatcher breeches. The final scene of the novel, in which the pigs and the human farmers are indistinguishable, was the logical endpoint of a process that began with the terror. The dream of equality, as old Major had articulated it, was replaced by a hierarchy in which the pigs adopted all the habits of Man they had sworn to avoid.