The Battersea Pig That Escaped: Why Pink Floyd Shot 'Animals' at a Power Station

The most famous thing about the Animals cover shoot isn’t the bleak London skyline — it’s the 40-foot inflatable pig that broke free, drifted into Heathrow’s flight path, and forced planes to be rerouted. The band had hired a marksman to shoot it down if it got loose; he missed, and the pig floated all the way to Kent before landing in a farmer’s field. It was later recovered, deflated, and the photo session had to be redone with a new pig on a shorter tether.

The choice of Battersea Power Station was deliberate. In the mid-1970s, the building was already a decaying industrial relic, and Roger Waters saw it as the perfect visual counterpart to Animals’ Orwellian critique of capitalism and class. The four chimneys also slyly mirrored the band’s four-man lineup at the time — Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason. The original plan was to have the pig hovering between the chimneys, but weather and wind kept ruining the shot until the pig’s famous escape made the whole thing a legendary headache.