I firmly believe that a leading economic indicator of recovery can be traced directly to the adoption of pets from shelters and foster families. We have just adopted out our third cat in the year 2010, which, I am almost embarrassed to say, is equal to the number of cats we adopted out in the whole of 2009. I don't wanna say 2009 was cursed, exactly, but … let's say I'm glad that year is in the bag.

Our latest adoptee is Carlos, who was only here as an official adoption candidate for just one week. He had been living in our yard for a few months, but he only got neutered last Thursday. When he first showed up, we didn't know he was tame, and he really kept his distance. Slowly, he would let us get closer and closer until the day I finally petted him. It is interesting to realize a cat as either feral or tame, as it changes your estimation of the cat quite a bit. A feral cat kind of needs to live outside, they will never 'get' humans, and they are most comfortable at least arm's length away from us.

But the tame ones have known humans in their past, and know they can be sources of comfort. We never find out where these tame cats come from, but they usually need some help remembering that they like people. So it was with Carlos, who met his new person like a lapcat who had never spent a night in a storage tub full of straw. It's nice to see that once you win them over, they're usually all right in their new homes, more or less.

I'm excited to finally adopt one of our fosters out to a neighbor, in this case a couple who live next door to us. I feel sort of bad, in that I had never really thought of my block as a potential source of adopters. After all, this neighborhood and its environs are the source of most of the cats we take in. But clearly not every person on this block is an irresponsible pet owner.  Carlos' new family are recent transplants from the south side of Williamsburg so we can be sure they haven't contributed to the stray cat population. But I will be more aware of this nearby resource and hope to adopt out more cats to my neighbors.

So good luck, Carlos (or whatever his name ends up being)! I took him over to his new home and he immediately took to it, in no small part I'm sure because the place wasn't crawling with cats like our house.