What do you think happened to the milk in Animal Farm?

Early in George Orwell’s fable (or, perhaps, more
accurately, allegory) Animal Farm, the animals are becoming
increasingly agitated about their subordination to and dependence upon humans.  The farm
animals have begun to question the existing arrangement, in which they serve at the
pleasure of man, who does, himself, contribute to the arrangement but seems to exist
solely to consume the fruits of others’ efforts.  As Major notes in his address to the
assembled masses,

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 “‘Man is the only creature that consumes
without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull
the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the
animals. . .And what has happened to that milk which should have been breeding up sturdy
calves? Every drop of it has gone down the throats of our
enemies.’”

Major’s speech is
revealing in Orwell’s allegorical tale about tyranny and human nature.  He, of course,
is a boar, and, as will be revealed in Chapter III, it is the pigs who abscond with the
missing milk after Napolean, another boar’s, refrain to the assembled animals to ignore
the issue of the milk: “‘Never mind the milk, comrades!’ cried Napoleon, placing himself
in front of the buckets. ‘That will be attended to. The harvest is more important.
Comrade Snowball will lead the way.”

The boars’ apparent
diversionary tactic, and an important literary device in the story’s evolution, conceals
the answer to the question of the missing milk.  As Orwell’s narrator notes, “The
mystery of where the milk went to was soon cleared up. It was mixed every day into the
pigs’ mash.”  The pigs, it turns out, conspired to keep the milk for themselves,
justifying their actions on the basis of their presumed importance to the broader
enterprise:

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“All the pigs were in full agreement on this
point, even Snowball and Napoleon. Squealer was sent to make the necessary explanations
to the others. ‘Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing
this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and
apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our
health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances
absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are
brainworkers.”

The pigs, in
other words, kept the milk for themselves because of their conviction that their
survival and prosperity is key to the success of the animals’ plan for self-rule.  That
the pigs have succeeded, at least for the moment, in institutionalizing the ancient
concept of ‘first among equals’ -- as would the Nomenclatura of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its infamous and decidedly unsocialist hierarchy
– so does this early and prominent fracture in the animals’ newly established order
serve as the central theme of Orwell’s story.