Animal Farm Oppression Essay

Jake Morita

Mr. Souders

7-1

May 17, 2023

“Why the Animals were Oppressed”

Have you ever hated someone so much that you ran them out of their own home for good? Animal Farm, by George Orwell, is a fable about a group of animals on a farm that get treated with cruelty. They decide to rebel, and run their owner out of his own home. Then, the animals provide for each other and create a healthy, safe environment. Although, throughout the course of the book, the pigs took over, and the animals became unequal. The pigs, specifically one pig, became the leader, and all the animals were inferior to him. Napoleon, the leader, created a very unequal society, and at the end, it seemed as if the animals were given the same treatment as they were in the

Besides the pigs, the animals were all stupid, some more than others. Some were oblivious to their surroundings, they didn't know how to put up an argument, and others didn't even know the alphabet! How can this group of animals be so stupid that they don't even know the alphabet!For example, one horse, Clover, wanted to look at something, but she didn't know how to read, “Finding herself unable to read, she fetched Muriel,”(Animal Farm, 66.) In this quote, Clover the horse wanted to read the ten commandments, but she realized she didn’t know how to read. So she fetched her friend, Muriel, and he read it to her. The animals are also oblivious to their surroundings. The ten commandments (the animals’ base set of rules) were slightly adjusted throughout the story by the pigs, and the animals didn’t realize this. One day, the pigs completely changed the commandments, “There was nothing there now except a single commandment. It ran: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,”(Animal Farm, 134.) Squealer, one of the pigs, completely changed the commandments to just one single commandment. If all the animals had found out about this, they could have tried to protest or do something to make their lives better. Nearly all of the animals didn’t realize this, because they were oblivious to their surroundings. The animals' stupidity is also due to the fact that they

The animals are very forgetful. They can’t remember anything of major significance, they can’t remember things they experienced from the past, and they can’t remember minor details. The animals can’t remember anything of major significance, which is a huge reason why they are oppressed. The pigs announced that Snowball was a traitor, and they removed him from, Animal Hero First Class, which made the animal top marks. The pigs said that Snowball was in league with Jones from the start, but, “They all remembered, or thought they remembered, how they had seen Snowball charging ahead of them at the Battle of Cowshed,” (Animal Farm, 80.) If the animals had a better memory, they might have been more sure that Snowball was not a traitor, but since they weren’t 100% sure, the animals listened to what the pigs said. If the animals could remember things of significance, it could have stopped them from being oppressed. Another factor of the animals’ oppression is their forgetfulness of experiences from the past. At the start of the book, the animals were stoked about starting a rebellion, and getting to have an equal, safe, and healthy environment. Although, at the end of the book, “Some of the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones’s expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not