Forty Years Before 'Animal Farm' Was Pubished,

amid the clamour and noise of WW2,
there was another alegorical novel
that drew on how country life was torn
by division and strife, which also used animals
to illustrate human politics.
 - 'The Wind in The Willows', by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame used animals to describe the class system,
just as much as George Orwell did. But where Orwell
aggressively divided his animals via different tasks
which amounted to a managerial theory for how a farm,
or enterprise, might be maintained without a owner,
Grahame's book was a responce to the then-new threat
facing the Edwardian social order - where historically
the aristocrat protected the peasant. The threat came from
the newly urban peripatetic peasnts who saw socialism
via the redistribution of land, as the solution to their unrest.

They saw themselves less as upstarts, more signs of new growth
 - part of a new eco-system, that was drew from the old,
which it would in time replace. In the end the upstart weasels
in the book were defeated, as were The Labour Party in real life.

The old order of Toad in charge,
Badger Ratty and Mole as his friends,
when he wanted them to be, was restored.

The old feudalism won over the calls for wider redistrobution
and restored it's hidden divisions and mutual denial, fit enough
to defend itself against future challengers. Wherever they started.....