#notallC.A.B.
A look at what the retired horses of Portland’s no-longer Mounted Unit have been up to, a year after they were disbanded:
Murphy went back home in southern Oregon where he’s competing in dressage, a highly skilled form of riding, while Red, Monty and Asher are with families who wished to keep their locales private. Major found his place in Prineville, while Diesel went back home to Port Orchard, Washington. Olin aids people with mental or physical barriers as a therapy horse at Forward Stride in Beaverton, and Zeus lives with a former mounted patrol stable attendant at the Lake Oswego Hunt Club.
But why, as the kids say, do you have to go and make this political.
Even though she has friends living in the city, Mack said she remembers her years there with the horses so vividly that she can’t bear to visit Portland anymore.
“Honestly, it’s sad for me to go there,” she said. “I mean, I look around every corner and remember when a horse was walking there.”
And she still wonders, she said, why the unit was disbanded yet again.
“It’s pretty hazy to me as to why, after 20 years of blood, sweat and tears, I was told it was a budget issue when it didn’t appear to be a budget issue.”
She said they were told the mounted patrol would be replaced by community service officers, but she never saw that happen.
“There’s all this talk about community policing,” Mack said. “Well, you cut the best community policing tool you ever had.”
If nothing else, one might idly muse over what might’ve become of recent antifa and fascist clashes had they been met with crowd-control officers on horseback, and not barely-less-than-lethal SWAT troops looking for a fight.
(And I know why the mounted unit was disbanded: it’s because I mentioned them over there once, and as with anything I work into the story like that, once I’ve done so, it must then be demolished, destroyed, forgotten, erased from the city.)
