A final carrot, then off to the sticks for retiring police horse

Gunny, a 19-year-old San Francisco Police Department Mounted Unit Tennessee walker, receives a carrot from Police Chief Toney Chaplin during his retirement ceremony. Gunny, a 19-year-old San Francisco Police Department Mounted Unit Tennessee walker, receives a carrot from Police Chief Toney Chaplin during his retirement ceremony. Photo: Michael Noble Jr., The Chronicle Photo: Michael Noble Jr., The Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close A final carrot, then off to the sticks for retiring police horse 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

Gunny the police horse, a beloved member of a department where the word “beloved” is not often trotted out, is retiring.

On Wednesday morning, in exchange for his seven years of service, he received four carrots and three apples.

It was the highlight of a San Francisco police horse retirement ceremony on Geary Street, next to Union Square. Acting Police Chief Toney Chaplin, who was handing out the fruits and veggies, acknowledged that police work is easier from the back of a horse than most other places.

“This is one of the most coveted gigs in the department,” he said of the mounted patrol. “You have to stay with us a couple of decades to get to this point.”

Gunny, 19, is going out to pasture, the non-figurative kind. He will be living at an undisclosed location in the Sierra foothills, because cops never reveal their addresses. His pasture mate will be fellow police horse Strider, who retired in 2013.

Most cops have waited longer for the horse gig than horses like Gunny have been alive. Mounted Officer Robert Toy, who used to be a member of the SWAT team, waited 27 years.

“In this position, people like you,” he said, with the smile of a man who gets to ride a horse for a living. “In my other one, they didn’t.”

Gunny performed his last patrol about six months ago, about the same time his left rear foot began to go lame. Since then, the Tennessee walker has been doing his walking slowly, in the police paddock in Golden Gate Park.

The word “lame” does not often bode well for members of his species, particularly the racing kind. But Gunny, under the terms of his golden parachute, need never fear the glue factory and need never again have a human on his back.

On Wednesday, he was given the honor of having one of his horseshoes nailed to the exalted spot where most retired police horse shoes go — the transom above the front door of Lefty O’Doul’s restaurant. The transom was already overflowing with the horseshoes of Magnum, Rebel, Hammer, Riddle, Charlie, Hawk and Hunter, so the restaurant was obliged to install Gunny’s shoe on an adjoining wall.

His human partners were sad to see him go. One of his riders, Officer Susan Rolovich, said a horse is better than a car for park patrols and for making friends.

“You know what Sixth Street is like,” she said. “Well, on Sixth Street, everyone likes seeing us. They don’t look at us like we’re police. They look at us like we’re someone on a horse.”

On horseback, a cop poses for pictures, rides in parades, answers questions from well-wishers and hands out stickers to kids. Those in cop cars usually don’t.

Officer Jim Riordan is another cop who waited decades for his mount. When the public sees him, he said, “they forget about that anticop thing.”

Gunny, like his equine colleagues, is a calm critter immune to the parade of trucks, double-deck buses and taxis buzzing through Union Square like a paddock horsefly. Rolovich said Gunny also was a sensitive partner who “needs a lot of love and needs to be babied.” She said she was about to cry, but she didn’t, because a kid found out she had stickers and asked for one.

As for Gunny, he took the ceremony in the kind of stride that only a Tennessee walker can. A sensible member of the force who understands that being a cop is about making good choices, Gunny spit out his last carrot when he saw that Chaplin was about to offer him an apple. At his feet was a soggy mass of half-chewed carrot, not the only stuff on Geary Street that needed picking up.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com