rabbit

Rabbits are among the wild creatures that inhabit the margins of Animal Farm, never fully integrated into the community of domesticated animals but repeatedly drawn into the farm's political life. Their ambiguous position—neither clearly friend nor enemy—is settled at the very founding of Animalism, when Old Major raises the question of whether wild creatures such as rats and rabbits should be considered comrades. The vote is taken at once, and an overwhelming majority agrees that rats are comrades; the rabbits, by implication, are included in this category. Only the three dogs and the cat dissent, and the cat is later discovered to have voted on both sides. This early decision establishes the principle that wild animals, despite not being part of the farm's regular workforce, are entitled to the protections of Animalism.

The Failed Re-Education of the Wild Creatures

After the Rebellion, Snowball, the more inventive of the two leading pigs, busies himself with organising the other animals into what he calls Animal Committees. Among these is the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee, whose stated object is to tame the rats and rabbits. The attempt, however, breaks down almost immediately. The wild creatures continue to behave very much as before, and when treated with generosity, they simply take advantage of it. The cat joins the Re-education Committee and is very active in it for some days, but her efforts are transparently self-serving: she is seen sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who are just out of her reach, telling them that all animals are now comrades and that any sparrow who chooses could come and perch on her paw, but the sparrows keep their distance. The rabbits, like the sparrows, remain untamed, and the committee's failure underscores the limits of Animalism's appeal beyond the farm's domesticated population.

Rabbits as Instruments of Propaganda

As Napoleon consolidates his power and the regime becomes increasingly paranoid, rabbits are repeatedly invoked as allies of the expelled Snowball. During the winter of the first food shortage, the rats, which have been troublesome, are said to be in league with Snowball, and the rabbits are implicitly grouped with them as part of the same network of subversion. When Napoleon conducts a full investigation into Snowball's activities, he snuffs the ground for traces of Snowball's footsteps, which he claims he can detect by the smell, and finds traces almost everywhere. The rabbits, like the rats, become symbols of an invisible, pervasive threat that justifies the regime's tightening control. In the confessions extracted during the Purge, a goose confesses to having secreted six ears of corn during the last year's harvest and eaten them in the night, and a sheep confesses to having urinated in the drinking pool—urged to do this, so she says, by Snowball. The rabbits, though never directly accused, are part of the same atmosphere of suspicion, their wildness now recast as treachery.

The Rabbits' Place in the Final Order

By the final years of the farm, the rabbits have been entirely forgotten as individuals. The farm is more prosperous and better organised, but the animals themselves are generally hungry, sleep on straw, drink from the pool, and labour in the fields. The rabbits, like the other wild creatures, continue to live on the margins, neither tamed nor exterminated, but their existence no longer prompts any political discussion. The Seven Commandments have been reduced to a single maxim: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." The rabbits, never having been truly equal in the first place, are simply ignored. Their story—from comrades to subjects of re-education to instruments of propaganda to irrelevance—mirrors the trajectory of Animalism itself, a doctrine that began with the promise of universal brotherhood and ended with the rule of the pigs.