I read this book once as a kid, and never touched it again until today's reread. I hated it then - I picked it up, I think, because it was a book about animals, and was promptly confronted with poor old Boxer being betrayed to the knacker's yard. It horrified me. I didn't appreciate anything else about the book as I was too miserable for Boxer. It honestly put me off reading it ever again, which is a bit of a shame as I love Orwell's work generally. His 1984 is one of the greatest scifi books of all time as far as I'm concerned.

(I felt much less bad for Winston than I did for Boxer, but then I was (am) soft about animals. Humans at least did it to themselves, or so I reckoned.)

Reading it again, Boxer is still a tragic figure. And yet there's something very Leopards Ate My Face about the whole barnyard which has limited both my sympathy and my emotional response. And yes, I know, it's a metaphor for human activity, Boxer is not really a horse and so forth, and while perhaps the clear non-animal nature of the animals has dampened my misery response... there comes a time when you've got to admit that doing foolish things comes with consequences. The pigs were clearly evil early on, and the time to resist their depredations was early on. Failing that, later is better than never. 

Even so... poor fucking Boxer. The sheer ingratitude of it!!!