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

Early in
s(or, perhaps, more accurately, ) , 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,

 €˜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.

Majors speech is revealing in 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 boars, refrain to the assembled animals to ignore the issue of the milk: €˜Never mind
the milk, comrades! cried , placing himself in front of the buckets. €˜That will be attended to.
The harvest is more important. Comradewill lead the way.

The boars apparent
diversionary tactic, and an important literary device in the storys evolution, conceals the
answer to the question of the missing milk.  As Orwells 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:

All
the pigs were in full agreement on this point, even Snowball and Napoleon.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 Orwells story.