Note: This story was first published in the Toronto Star on Jan. 2, 2016.

It’s a secret Toronto thing so secret that most people don’t know about it.

The Toronto Police Service mounted unit puts out a deck of horse trading cards every other year. You can’t buy them, though. That would be too impersonal.

You have to be lucky enough to stumble upon an officer on patrol or at a school event, strike up a conversation and be offered a card. You’ll have better luck if you’re a kid.

What an icebreaker. What a souvenir.

The cards have been an underground thing for a decade. Taxpayers don’t foot the bill so don’t fret about that.

Nope, these cards are the passion project of two civilians, Anne de Haas and the late Dorothy Keith. De Haas is a portrait photographer who devotes her free time to shooting the horses and their riders. Keith was the much-loved, fiercely private woman who financed the card project. She died in 2015 at the age of 99.

“Dot was the angel who made everything possible,” de Haas stresses. “Without her, none of it would have happened.”

Rewind to 2000 or so. De Haas and Keith lived in the same apartment building and were looking for things to do together.

“Dot loved men in uniform and horses,” thought de Haas, “so what better way to give her both than to take her on a tour of the mounted unit?”

They knocked on the unit headquarters door, at the Horse Palace at Exhibition Place, and asked for a tour. (You can’t do that now.)

The women fell in love with the place and snagged a standing invitation to return. They started coming weekly with apples and carrots for the horses. They travelled on their own dime with the unit to out-of-town events. Keith bought every horse a new saddle.

When she discovered some mounted units have trading cards, she decided “our guys should have cards.” De Haas would take the pictures and handle layout and design. Keith would pay the printing bill. They created about 40 cards in 2005 and printed 3,000 of each.

The officers handed the cards out free — mainly to children — to promote community/police relations.

The cards were an instant hit.

They usually come out every other year, and sometimes have themes. One set showcased historic Toronto for the city’s 125th birthday. Another showcased our priority neighbourhoods. There’s usually a fundraising calendar that you can buy down at the Horse Palace.

De Haas devotes thousands of volunteer hours to the passion project. She remembers pulling up in the Jane/Finch area with a police trailer. Curtains twitched but people stayed inside — until the horses were unloaded.

“People came out of the woodwork. They were engaging with the officers, petting the horses, talking. It happens a lot, not just in that neighbourhood.”

The horses, says Sgt. Kristopher McCarthy, “draw people out of their homes and make them feel safe.” The training sergeant rides Honest Ed and gets goose bumps every time he hands out his trading card and sees barriers instantly drop.

Right now the unit has 27 horses. They come from Mennonite farms when they’re between 3 and 5 years old. It takes 6 to 12 months to train them. Every officer has an assigned mount, but there are 35 officers so some share horses.

Police horses work until they’re about 20, doing crowd management, providing divisional support, conducting searches and “doing PR.” When it’s time to retire, they’re sold to their riders, unit members or carefully screened private owners who promise they won’t work.

Many of de Haas’s candid photos now cover the unit headquarter walls. In an odd twist, both she and McCarthy are allergic to horses.

It takes some wheedling, but during a visit earlier this year to the unit she eventually agrees to mount a horse named Winston, reluctantly standing on McCarthy’s back to get up.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“I am not comfortable in the spotlight. I would rather be hiding behind my camera.”

McCarthy enjoys the moment and the chance to tease his friend.

“I’ve never seen Patty (Anne) on a horse,” he says.

He was in training when de Haas and Keith started coming around. What he remembers most is how “they became family almost instantly to us.”

The feeling is mutual. De Haas says the mounted officers “are like my brothers and sisters. I love every single one of them.”

And, she stresses, as much as the horse cards have been her “labour of love all these years, without Dorothy none of it would have been possible.”

When Keith died, the unit gave her “a perfect send-off” complete with horses and a ceremonial blanket laid on her casket.

“We escorted her all the way to her final destination,” remembers McCarthy.

The latest set of trading cards came out just before the death of the woman who so loved the horses and their riders. But de Haas says she’ll find a way for the souvenir cards that Keith created for Toronto to continue.

“No matter what,” vows de Haas, “the card program will go on.”

By the numbers:

<bullet> 50: the number of unique cards in a set

<bullet> 3,000: the number printed of each card

<bullet> $10,000: the total cost of printing for a round of sets