If De Quincey evoked “murder as one of the fine arts”, fine arts have always been the locus of animal murders, but that is slowly emerging as a topic of research. Former Young British Artist Damien Hirst is notorious for having caused the deaths of more than one million insects and animals – over a period when the world was putting to death millions of domestic animals for various reasons (“Mad Cow disease”, “avian influenza”, “scrapie”), alongside the global sixth mass extinction. This talk aims at scrutinizing Damien Hirst’s This Little Piggy (1996) and at contextualizing it also within the field of art from a number of perspectives. The work belongs to the tradition of medical exhibitions of human or animal body parts in formaldehyde jars; it is also an obvious instance of a modern memento mori, clearly placing the dead pig within the range of an “esthétique de la charogne” (Afeissa 2018). Pastoureau’s studies of the pig from a historico-cultural perspective (2001, 2009) resonate with animal studies (Berger 1972 & 1980; Baratay 2012; Dardenne 2020; Assouly 2022; Crary & Gruen 2022) to try and elucidate the importance of this animal in these twofold traditions – and its place in a museum turned into a zoological institution of sorts. Greek paradoxes and modern myths (from Zeno’s paradox to Frankenstein) will allow one to ponder the dead pig’s constant dismemberment (Didi-Huberman 1995) and reconfiguration (as one of the tanks relentlessly moves forward and backward on a track thanks to an engine). The gruesome installation forms a counterpoint with the apparently desultory title (as opposed to the more philosophical title for the tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, in 1991), which is borrowed from a popular nursery rhyme. This Little Piggy will also be replaced within the Western (and the British) tradition of sculpture (from kinetic art to body art) with a particular focus on its oscillation between the apparent parading of life (the pig seems to be dancing) and the exhibition of death (and its entrails), between the grotesque and the obscene (Mannoni 1969 ; Kristeva 1987 ; Maier 2004).