Conscienceless Pigs

It is widely known that power, in the wrong hands, can be an open door to corruption and unfairness. George Orwell has depicted this sad fact in his widely acclaimed novel, Animal Farm. In the novel, the pigs represent the tyrannical, greedy leaders. They are led by Napoleon, arguably the least ethical of all of them. The pigs rally around this sadistic authority, gradually turning themselves into selfish, loathsome creatures. By not being implicit at all about this appalling yet intriguing transformation, George Orwell illustrates in detail how power can, and will, end in corruption. The pigs depict this theory by slowly losing their fairness, ethics and ideals. When the novel ends, they turn out to be not only as bad as Jones, but worse, suggesting that George Orwell had little faith in the animals’ revolution and, ultimately, its Russian counterpart.

The pigs turn increasingly unfair through the course of Animal Farm. They begin by taking the milk and apples, which are supposedly reserved for them under the pretext that they require more nutrition for planning than the rest of the animals. This excuse is available on page 53 – “So it was agreed… that the milk and the windfall apples… should be reserved for the pigs alone.” The hardworking animals take this rather well and find it to be a very logical thing to do, all the while blatantly unaware of the fact that it is the beginning of a long journey downhill. This journey continues when the pigs begin to alter the Commandments to suit their needs. The other animals, with the exception of Benjamin the donkey (who may represent Orwell himself) are really quite oblivious to the unfairness of this. They further demonstrate their naïveté by working extremely hard – harder than usu...

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...hough wearing clothes is against the Third Commandment). By going against the Commandments, which were the foundation of the entire Revolution, the pigs demonstrated how corrupt they had become.

George Orwell highlighted the fact that power oft leads to corruption in Animal Farm. He did this by showing how the pigs’ ethics and morals falter as they gain power, and how the ideals of the Revolution are lost on them. By depicting the Soviet leaders this way (for that is what the pigs represented), Orwell made it clear that, in his opinion, the Russian Revolution would not end well. Based on these assumptions (which turn out to be unnervingly accurate), one can deduce that many powerful leaders, if already somewhat pig-like, face the impending fate of becoming as corrupt as many Disney stars (because everyone knows that one cannot become more corrupt than that).