Seven Commandments: Encyclopedia II - Seven Commandments - Breaking the Seven Commandments

Seven Commandments - Breaking the Seven Commandments

By the end of the book, all of the Seven Commandments are broken by the pigs for their own personal gain. Squealer constantly changed the Commandments to the pigs' benefit, taking advantage of the other animals.

• No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets
• No animal shall drink alcohol to excess
• No animal shall kill any other animal without cause

In the end, the pigs learn to stand on two legs and regard their four-legged friends as enemies. They start to wear Mr. Jones' clothes, sleep in beds and drink alcohol. They brutally order the killings of all of the confessing animals. Later, when Boxer the horse is hurt, he is "sent to the vet" but in reality is sent to a horse-slaughterer by the pigs, or at least, a reader that reads between the lines can assume as much. In the pig's reality, however, the car was just an old horse-slaughterer's car, and is now a vet's car. Boxer died mysteriously at the hospital. The pigs felt as if they were above the animals in rank, and they were not equal.

The Commandments' summation ("Four legs good, two legs bad!") is changed to "Four legs good, two legs better!" (italics Orwell's), as the pigs become more human.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Breaking the Seven Commandments", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki