No animal shall kill any other animal without cause

The Sixth Commandment, as originally painted on the end wall of the big barn by Snowball, read simply: "No animal shall kill any other animal." It was one of the seven unalterable laws that were to govern Animal Farm forever, and for a time it held. After the expulsion of Jones, no animal had killed another animal—not even a rat. But the commandment was tested and then rewritten in the wake of the executions that followed the purge of Snowball's supposed agents.

Origin and Original Wording

The Sixth Commandment was part of the system of thought that the pigs had elaborated from Old Major's teachings into a complete system called Animalism. Snowball, with Squealer holding the paint-pot, climbed a ladder and inscribed the Seven Commandments on the tarred wall in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away. The original wording was unambiguous: "No animal shall kill any other animal." The animals nodded in complete agreement, and the cleverer ones at once began to learn the Commandments by heart. The sheep, however, were unable to learn them by heart, so Snowball reduced the principles to a single maxim: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

The First Violation and the Amendment

When Napoleon, after the expulsion of Snowball, ordered the dogs to tear out the throats of four pigs who had confessed to collaborating with Snowball, and then slaughtered three hens, a goose, and several sheep, the animals were shaken and miserable. They remembered—or thought they remembered—that the Sixth Commandment decreed "No animal shall kill any other animal." Though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings did not square with this. Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, but he refused to meddle. She fetched Muriel, who read it aloud. It now ran: "No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE." Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory. But they saw now that the commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.

Pattern of Commandment Alteration

The amendment of the Sixth Commandment was not an isolated act. It followed a pattern established earlier when the Fourth Commandment, "No animal shall sleep in a bed," was found to have been altered to "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." Clover had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets, but as it was there on the wall, it must have done so. Similarly, the Fifth Commandment, "No animal shall drink alcohol," was later discovered to read "No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS." The animals had remembered it wrong. The pattern was consistent: each time the pigs violated a commandment, the wording on the wall quietly changed to accommodate the violation, and the animals' memories were adjusted accordingly.

The Final Transformation

By the end of the novel, the Seven Commandments had been reduced to a single principle: "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." The original Sixth Commandment, along with all the others, had been painted over. The wall that had once held the unalterable law now bore only this final, cynical maxim. The commandment against killing had been the last to fall, but fall it did, and with it the last pretense that Animal Farm was governed by anything other than the pigs' will to power.