An article today by Diane Jennings at DallasNews.com details the 25th anniversary of the Dallas, Texas, mounted police, and what the unit does today as a law enforcement unit.

The article noted that there were more than 650 mounted units in the United States, based on numbers from 1997. However, having a mounted police unit is not cheap in this day of tightening city budgets.

An unusual note in the article was that the Dallas mounted police ride Australian stock saddles, not typical Western saddles with a saddle horn. The article details somme of the duties of the unit, from patrol to reduce burglaries, to crowd control, to police funerals.

The article quoted mounted police officer Senior Cpl. Luis Villarreal as saying, “The pressures of the SWAT unit are ‘absolutely nothing’ compared with controlling an 1,800-pound horse amid honking horns, pounding jackhammers, and swirling litter in downtown Dallas