Animal farm / Скотный двор. Уровень 2

Besides that there were classes in reading and writing.

But these projects were a failure. The attempt to tame the wild creatures, for instance, broke down almost immediately. If someone treated the wild animals with generosity, they simply took advantage of it. The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. One day she sat on a roof and talked to some sparrows. She told them that all animals were now comrades and invited sparrows to come and perch on her paw. But the sparrows kept their distance.

The reading and writing classes, however, were a great success. By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate.

As for the pigs, they read and wrote perfectly. The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in this art. They read the Seven Commandments only. Muriel, the goat, read better than the dogs, and sometimes read to the others in the evenings from scraps of newspaper which she found on the rubbish heap.

Benjamin read as well as a pig, but never exercised his faculty.

He said, this was useless. Clover learned the alphabet, but to put words together was a problem. Boxer knew the first four letters of the alphabet only. He wrote A, B, C, D, in the dust with his great hoof, and then stared at the letters. Sometimes he shook his forelock, and tried to remember what came next. He never succeeded. On several occasions, indeed, he learned E, F, G, H, but he suddenly forgot A, B, C, and D. Finally he decided to be content with the first four letters. He wrote them once or twice every day to refresh his memory.

Mollie learned six letters which spelt her own name. She made these letters from some twigs, and then decorated them with flowers and walked round them.

The other animals on the farm knew the letter A only. And this was enough. The stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart. Snowball offered to reduce the Seven Commandments to a single maxim: “Four legs good, two legs bad.

” This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism. The birds at first objected, since they also had two legs, but Snowball said,

“A bird’s wing, comrades, is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. Therefore it is a leg. The mark of man is the HAND, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”

The birds did not understand Snowball’s long words, but they accepted his explanation.