The ending of Animal Farm is extremely pessimistic. The animals have traded a more lenient owner (Jones) for a brutal dictator (Napoleon) and their lives are harder than ever before. All the promises of a brighter future have been betrayed. They work as hard or harder for Napoleon than they did for Jones, and the pigs have become surrogate humans. The pigs now control the animals, and have mostly convinced them that they are being oppressed for their own good.
They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they laboured in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the cold, and in summer by the flies.
[...]
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
(Orwell, Animal Farm, msxnet.org)
The implication is that the pigs are now treated as equals by the humans, and since they have a unique insight into the mindset of other animals, they are able to exploit much more work for greater personal profit. Jones ran the farm normally, as a subsistence facility; the pigs run it as a slave plantation, where all the effort is done by the animals and all the benefits go to the pigs. The book does not continue past this point; both film versions showed the eventual collapse of the farm as its policies prove unsustainable.
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