ORONO – The University of Maine Police Department will be riding high in the saddle when it unveils its new horse-mounted division at today’s football game.

“This is a great addition to the department,” Sgt. Leroy Patterson, who is heading the new division, said this week. “We’ll be able to go to different areas we weren’t able to reach before with motorized vehicles.”

Two horses eventually will be used to patrol the 660-acre campus, more than 75 percent of which is mostly inaccessible by motor vehicle, Patterson said. For now, however, the horses will be used during large events, such as football games, outdoor rallies, Bumstock and situations in which officers need to move quickly through campus gridlock.

UMaine will be only the second agency in the state to have an active mounted division, with Portland having had its force for more than 20 years. The university, however, will have the only mounted officers in the state come next week, when Portland will send its division to the stables because it no longer has enough officers to run the program, Portland police Sgt. Gary Hutcheson said.

The program has been in the works for more than 15 years, but the concept caught on only in the last two years, Patterson said. “We had a meeting with [University of Maine] President [Peter] Hoff and he thought it was a great idea three years ago, so we’ve been working on it ever since.”

Patterson, a UMaine officer for 25 years, believes the benefits of using horses are numerous.

One of the main advantages is the enhanced field of view the officer has due to height advantage, he said. The advantage gives the officers the opportunity to see things that might have gone undetected by an officer in a cruiser or on foot.

The mounted patrol will play an important role in public relations as well, Patterson said. The officers and horses have a unique ability to mingle with citizens, which will foster positive relations between the police and citizens.

The department’s first horses, retired standardbred racehorses named Plain Rhapsody and On Her Own, have come a long way after spending the bulk of their 10-year lives at Bangor Raceway.

For nearly two years, student interns at UMaine have been working to turn On Her Own into a saddle horse and more than a year’s worth of work has been put into training Plain Rhapsody. Meanwhile, Patterson and Officer Deb Mitchell have been taking riding lessons.

The university regularly takes on retired racehorses to be trained for saddle riding or show competitions and then sold off, said Jan Hartwell, who has been an instructor at UMaine for three years.

The last several months, however, have been the most interesting, Patterson said, as the two officers, Hartwell, and recent division addition Officer Amy Nickerson, have been taking the horses through training exercises that will prepare both the officer and horse for mounted police work.

“The good thing about using racehorses is that they’ve already been subjected to so many things where they’re around fairs with bright lights, loud noises and lots of people all the time,” Hartwell said. “We’ve been working at desensitizing them to all types of things because you never know what they’re going to face.”

The officers, Hartwell, and students have rolled 55-gallon drums toward the horses, blared loud music and sirens, run at them, popped balloons beside them, thrown balls at them, and even had the horses walk past blue tarps to condition the animals for what they may face while on duty.

“A tarp is the scariest bogeyman a horse could ever see because it makes a funny noise and they have very acute hearing,” Hartwell said. “There’s a number of things that can trigger a reaction.”

For now, the use of the horses isn’t costing the school any extra funds, Patterson said. The experimental program is using horses already owned and cared for by the university at the Franklin J. Witter Teaching and Research Farm on campus.

The horses will continue to be used in classes throughout the semester if they are needed, Hartwell said.

Eventually, the department will have to purchase its own horses if it wishes to continue the program, Patterson said. The department already has ordered riding equipment for the officers and horses, most of which has yet to arrive despite the public appearance scheduled Saturday. All of the equipment is expected to be on hand Sept. 26 in time for Parents and Friends Weekend when the division will make its next appearance.