In Animal Farm, the starting point is animal suffering and the cruelties of the human farmer. As Old Major, a wise and elderly boar, warns the other animals: 'You young porkers … every one of you will scream out your lives at the block within a year'. Human tyranny is the enemy of the animals, and despite the betrayal of their hopes under the leadership of the pig Napoleon, the justice of their cause is never undermined. For readers, Animal Farm can explore animal agency, and the fallacy of human exceptionalism.
CHARLOTTE SLEIGH: George Orwell’s Animal Farm turns 80 on August 17 2025. If there’s one thing every student of history or politics knows, it’s that the novella is not really about animals. Sure, the principal characters are pigs and horses. But really, so we are told, it is about the Soviet Union and what happened to the ideals of communism under the corrupt leadership of Joseph Stalin… But what if we were to take the animals in this famous tale more seriously?
Living in an era before the comprehensive introduction of massive-scale, chemically assisted agriculture, Orwell was not so far removed from pre-industrial farming and its intimate knowledge of animals. His 1936 essay about the shooting of an elephant in Burma is filled with anguish at the suffering of a real animal.
In Animal Farm too, the starting point is animal suffering – the cruelties of the human farmer are indisputable. As Old Major, a wise and elderly boar, warns the other animals: “You young porkers … every one of you will scream out your lives at the block within a year.”
The fable changes if we hold on to this reality throughout. It is reiterated by Orwell later on in the story, when the cruelties of Pinchfield Farm are reported to the animals. Human tyranny is the enemy of the animals, and despite the betrayal of their hopes under the leadership of the pig Napoleon, the justice of their cause is never undermined…
Orwell’s animal revolution, the overthrow of the farmer, is inspired by a pig’s dream. Old Major gathers the other farm beasts to tell them of his vision of “the Earth as it will be when Man has vanished”, and human exploitation of animals is no more. It’s the kind of description that would have the 20th-century animal psychologists turning in their graves. Animals with an inner life? Ridiculous!
Any dog owner will tell you that their four-legged friend has dreams – yet for decades, we allowed scientists to tell us they did not. Dog dreams are woven into the description of forest life created by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn. In his book How Forests Think (2013), Kohn argues that all animals think and imagine their future. Their survival – that fundamental driver of the farmyard revolution – is based on the ability to do so…
Dreams recur throughout Animal Farm, but are eventually driven out by words. The animals’ commandments, written on the barn wall, are deviously amended one by one to vindicate the pigs’ corruption.
Once meaning is externalised and objectified in the written word, it is susceptible to manipulation. Words can be rewritten and with them, the past. The animals become uncertain of their pre-verbal memories. Dreams disappear from the narrative.
Research in science communication has argued that recent trends in popular natural history respond to the desire of readers to be knitted back into the meaning of the more-than-human world that Kohn and others describe. For such a reader, Animal Farm can explore animal agency – and the fallacy of human exceptionalism. SOURCE…
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