The Police as Pigs: Language, Power, and the Final Scene of Animal Farm

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If you want to measure how much faith a society has in its institutions, listen to its slang.

When the enforcers of the law are called “pigs,” it’s not just an insult—it’s a verdict. The word has squealed its way through five centuries of English, from barnyards to battle lines, from the mud of industrial England to the tear gas of American streets. But nowhere does its meaning come into sharper focus than in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs who promise liberation end up looking exactly like the humans they overthrew.

The word “pig” has a pedigree longer than the nightstick. In 16th-century England, it was hurled at the greedy, the gluttonous, and the morally unclean. By the 1800s, when organized policing arrived to keep the working classes in line, “pig” found a new home. The constable who cracked heads at a strike or hauled off a pickpocket was no longer a man in uniform—he was a filthy beast serving the gentry. Language, as always, was the people’s first weapon.

When the term crossed the Atlantic, it landed hard in American cities where police corruption was as common as bootleg whiskey. Still, it didn’t truly stick until the 1960s, when the Civil Rights and antiwar movements needed a word to match their anger. “Pig” became protest poetry—three letters of fury, easy to chant and impossible to misunderstand.

The Black Panther Party sharpened it to a blade. In their newspapers and speeches, “pigs” symbolized the state’s hypocrisy: men preaching order while practicing violence. Their illustrations—snouted officers devouring freedom—turned the insult into political art. For a generation that watched authority crack skulls on television, “pig” became less a slur and more a diagnosis.

But there’s an irony buried in this word, one Orwell would have recognized. In Animal Farm, the pigs begin as the visionaries of the revolution. They rally the animals against human cruelty, promising equality, justice, and dignity. The barn becomes their courtroom, their constitution etched on the wall: All animals are equal.

And then, slowly, equality becomes negotiable. The pigs move into the farmhouse, drink the humans’ whiskey, and rewrite the commandments. By the final scene, the other animals peer through the window and can no longer tell pigs from men. The rebellion is complete—so is the corruption. The masters have merely changed faces.

That closing image is not so different from the one flickering across a smartphone screen after a questionable arrest or a violent encounter. The public looks through its own digital window and struggles to see the difference between protector and oppressor. The uniform, like Orwell’s pigskin, has absorbed the habits of the power it was meant to check.

To be fair, most officers aren’t villains. They are, in Orwell’s terms, the “Boxers” of the story—the workhorses who believe in duty, who say “I will work harder” even when the system betrays them. But institutions have a way of breeding their own species of pig: leaders who feed on privilege, bureaucracies that rewrite the rules, and cultures that protect the powerful at the expense of the just.

The slur endures because the symbol endures. When people cry “pig,” they’re not only condemning individuals—they’re naming a transformation. They’re saying that power, once meant to serve, has become something swollen, secretive, and self-satisfied. They’re saying that the face in the farmhouse window now wears a badge.

Yet the tragedy isn’t inevitable. Orwell’s genius was not in predicting tyranny but in warning how easily it grows out of noble beginnings. If power can corrupt the revolutionary pig, it can corrupt the guardian, the officer, the leader. The lesson is universal: when authority forgets its purpose, it becomes indistinguishable from the very thing it was created to resist.

And so, the next time someone hurls that word in anger, it might be worth listening—not to the insult, but to the history behind it. Language keeps receipts. The word “pig” has survived because, time and again, we’ve replayed the same story of power and moral decay. Like Orwell’s animals, we keep looking through the window, hoping to see something different.

So far, we still can’t tell the difference.