Courtesy | Peter Tracy
While the rest of the police force gets by on wheels, Peter Tracy and his police horse Lakota trot around town.
As one of the lead mounted officers for the Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department, Tracy combines two seemingly different interests: criminal justice and horses. After 14 years of riding horses and nearly as many years working in law enforcement, he was appointed a mounted officer by Hillsdale County.
Due to the rural nature of Hillsdale and limited funding, all four officers in the division are required to take care of and train their own horses. Tracy began training his horse Lakota from the age of 2, the average time a horse is broken.
“Because of my job, I feel like I’ve been able to grow a lot closer with my horse than most,” he said. Now that Lakota is 14 years old, the two have had more than a decade of experience together, a necessity for a rider to truly bond with their horse.
Lakota is a Leopard Appaloosa, a horse breed known for its spirited nature. Horses typically have brains about the size of a human fist, according to professor of biology Daniel York. Yet, Leopard Appaloosas like Lakota are known for their intelligence.
While horses can easily spook, Lakota has been properly trained against his instincts to push and not pull, to charge and not flee. Throughout his young life, Lakota has been used numerous times to track down theft and missing people. Oftentimes he is also used for crowd control, as a horse has far greater power and sight clearance than a single person.
“When I’m up on a horse, I can see about six feet higher up than when I’m on the ground,” Tracy explained. “That can make all the difference in a situation.”
This came in handy this summer at a local festival when Tracy and his partner broke up 10 fights in one night. While it might sound overwhelming, it’s a problem that his team is well equipped to handle.
In all of Tracy’s experience, there is one story that stands out to him the most. It involves Hillsdale resident and Hillsdale College alumna Kathy Connor ’79.
Connor was on vacation in Mexico when her neighbor found Connor’s horse trapped in her pool. It had fallen in after stepping on a pool cover that was supposed to be strong enough to hold an elephant.
It was a chilly Michigan winter, and the horse was suffering from hypothermia. If it hadn’t been for the rapid response by Hillsdale’s mounted patrol, she would have died by the evening. Tracy and three other mounted officers were able to pull Connor’s horse out of the water within an hour.
Conner said that the police force still talk about the story today.
“After I got home I made huge goody baskets for all the Hillsdale County sheriffs and mounted police involved,” Connor said. “They saved her life.”