Pit's Letter

Book excerpt: Like a latter-day Goya, Sue Coe is driven to create moral works, from stark renditions of slaughterhouse brutality to accounts of abused domestic animals and laboratory testing. In Pit's Letter, a hapless canine describes her desolate life to her only surviving sister. She recounts her puppyhood and upbringing in her human family, her heartless banishment, and finally her suffering and death at the hands of the experimenting scientists at Eden Biotechnology. Ironically, her former master winds up in the same situation: an accidental scratching infects him with a pathogen - and man and beast share the same fate.