How an Inflatable Pig Escaped and Brought Down the Sky for Pink Floyd's 'Animals' Cover

The most famous thing about the Animals album cover isn’t the Battersea Power Station itself—it’s the inflatable pig that broke loose during the photo shoot. The 40-foot pink pig, nicknamed Algie, was tethered between the station’s four chimneys but snapped its moorings and drifted into the flight path of Heathrow Airport. Planes were diverted, and the police received reports of a “flying pig” sighting before it finally landed in a farmer’s field in Kent.

Conceptually, the cover was designed by Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell) to match the album’s cynical take on society’s class system. The power station, already decommissioned, symbolized the decaying industrial landscape, while the pig floated above it as a kind of satirical flag—an ironic nod to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The band originally wanted the pig to have a giant erection, but the final image was airbrushed to remove it after focus groups found it distracting.

The photo shoot itself was a logistical nightmare. After the pig escaped, the crew had to reshoot weeks later, this time with a smaller pig and a marksman on standby in case it broke free again. Even then, the final cover photo was a composite—the pig was photographed separately and superimposed between the chimneys because the real shots never aligned perfectly.