rat

Rats first appear during Old Major's seminal address in the big barn, when four large rats creep out of their holes and sit on their hindquarters to listen. The dogs immediately catch sight of them, and the rats only save their lives by a swift dash back into their holes. Old Major raises his trotter for silence and puts the question to the meeting: "Are rats comrades?" The vote is taken at once, and an overwhelming majority agrees that rats are comrades. Only the three dogs and the cat dissent—the cat is later discovered to have voted on both sides. This moment establishes the principle that wild creatures, despite their ambiguous relationship to the farm's domestic order, are to be included in the revolutionary fellowship.

Role in the Rebellion and Early Farm Life

During the early months after the Rebellion, Snowball busies himself with organizing the animals into various committees, including the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee, whose object is to tame the rats and rabbits. The attempt breaks down almost immediately: the wild creatures continue to behave very much as before, and when treated with generosity, simply take advantage of it. The rats, like the other wild animals, remain outside the disciplined structure of the farm's new society, neither fully integrated nor actively opposed. The pigeons sent out by Snowball and Napoleon to spread the news of the Rebellion to neighboring farms are instructed to mingle with the animals there, but the rats are not part of this propaganda network; they exist on the margins of the revolutionary project.

Scapegoating and the Snowball Conspiracy

As the regime hardens under Napoleon's dictatorship, the rats are transformed from a neutral wild species into a convenient symbol of internal threat. When Snowball is accused of secretly frequenting the farm by night, the rats—which have been troublesome that winter—are said to be in league with him. The animals become so disturbed that they can hardly sleep in their stalls, and every night, it is said, Snowball comes creeping in under cover of darkness, performing all kinds of mischief: stealing corn, upsetting milk-pails, breaking eggs, trampling seedbeds, and gnawing the bark off fruit trees. Whenever anything goes wrong, it becomes usual to attribute it to Snowball, and the rats are implicated in this web of suspicion. The cows declare unanimously that Snowball creeps into their stalls and milks them in their sleep, and the rats are named as his accomplices. This association of rats with Snowball's nocturnal sabotage serves to justify the regime's tightening control and the purges that follow.

Narrative Significance

Rats function in the narrative as a barometer of the regime's ideological flexibility and its descent into paranoia. Initially granted the status of comrades by democratic vote, they are later retroactively branded as agents of the enemy, their wildness reinterpreted as treachery. The failure of the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee underscores the limits of the pigs' ability to impose order on nature, while the later accusations against the rats reveal how the regime manufactures threats to consolidate power. The rats never speak or act as characters; they are a blank screen onto which the farm's rulers project their fears. Their trajectory from accepted comrades to suspected conspirators mirrors the broader corruption of the Revolution's ideals, where the principle that "all animals are equal" is gradually eroded until even the most marginal creatures can be reclassified as enemies.