Several animals emerge with no credit whatsoever from Animal Farm. Benjamin the donkey is a case-hardened pessimist, as stolidly indifferent to conditions under the new regime as he was to the tyranny of Farmer Jones. The sheep are credulous dimwits, whose only function is to chant their approval for Napoleon’s self-aggrandizing schemes, while the Manor Farm cat is simply an opportunist, keener on eating the local birdlife and its rabbits rather than welcoming them into the communal fold. In the end, though, these turn out to be minor transgressions. With the exception of Snowball — a farsighted visionary whom Napoleon promptly chases off into exile — the pigs are the villains of the piece.

Item one on an extensive charge sheet is the wholesale betrayal of revolutionary principle and the substitution of collective decision-making with a wool-pulling autocracy. Item two is the assassination of political opponents. Item three is a consistent disregard for the concept of objective truth. But this is only the tip of an iceberg of callous, porcine depravity. To tyranny, violence, duplicity, and falsehood can be added hypocrisy, drunkenness, promiscuity, and (we infer) cheating at cards. The pigs may be clever and tactically astute, good at building windmills, brewing beer, and learning to walk on their hind legs. But all their expertise is put to malign ends. Orwell, clearly, loathes them from the start.