Last year alone, over 5000 wild animals came through the doors of the PAWS Wildlife Center (formerly known as HOWL). Many of the animals we see are victims of human development. Their homes are destroyed when forests are cut down, they face new predators in our domestic animals, and they are broken and maimed by our cars.

This issue of PAWS News is dedicated to furthering peaceful coexistence with wildlife by humans. We hope to raise awareness for the value of wildlife in our lives and to foster the recognition that we must choose how to live with wildlife. The PAWS Wildlife Center, along with other organizations in the state, stands ready to answer questions about living with wildlife.

This excerpt from The Outermost House by Henry Beston, 1926, speaks to the shift in thinking about wildlife and domesticated animals to which PAWS is committed:

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his own knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."