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Shortly before 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 6, a D.C. police mount named Zeus took a crap on the 2200 block of Champlain Street NW. Per departmental procedure, its unidentified rider dismounted Zeus to clean up the droppings before continuing with his night patrol of Adams Morgan. But when the officer went behind the horse, Zeus spooked and bolted up the street sans rider, passing several bewildered pedestrians. Seconds later, a police horse trailer sped up the street after the steed. Capt. Jeffrey Herold, of the department’s special-operations division, says horses rarely get loose, but good luck stopping them when they do. “A horse weighs thousands of pounds,” he says. “If he goes, he’s not coming back.” At least three police cruisers responded to the runaway-horse call, though, and Zeus was corralled within minutes, near Columbia Road NW. No one was hurt, and no property was damaged in the incident, Herold says, but the department undertook a cursory investigation all the same. It determined nothing was amiss with Zeus or its rider. “We cleaned up the poop, so to speak,” Herold says. —Mike DeBonis