It was the moment many parents who have daughters fear. My daughter sat me down and said, “We need to talk.”

After several deep breaths and nervous energy, I sat down with her and said she can always talk to me and tell me anything that’s going on in her life. She took a deep breath and said, “I want to get a horse.”

I told her to immediately pack up her room and start looking for places to rent. I kid, of course.

It’s interesting how in the dairy farming world, we tend to have an antagonistic relationship with horses. I think it stems from our constant dissecting of converting the least amount of feed cost into the most amount of milk, and the idea of converting hay and grain into a horse is completely contrary to that life end.

Growing up, we had a horse for a brief moment in time for my younger sister, who got most everything she wanted. I distinctly remember the conversation of asking my dad for a dirt bike and him responding that every investment on the farm needed to be producing milk, help produce milk or be heading in that direction.

On the surface, the thought of buying a horse seems like a fairly fixed cost – buy the horse, buy the feed – and yet it doesn’t end there. A horse person cannot own a ratted-out cattle trailer with a '90s Ford pickup holding on for dear life. They invariably need a $100,000 horse trailer to cart these fine specimens to horse shows. Horses also apparently get lonely in these trailers and need to be joined by their owners in sleeping quarters in the same said trailer. This particular trailer cannot be pulled by a regular farm truck, but needs only the finest products that Ford, Chevy and Dodge make.

The extravagance doesn’t end there. Horses now need to be housed in only the finest horse barns with covered arenas for exercising. Owning a horse is not simply a hobby; it has to become an all-consuming identity.

My knowledge of horses comes from one particularly vivid memory of being a 15-year-old boy with dreams of becoming a cowboy and winning the heart of Shania Twain with my adept horse-riding abilities. This dream lasted all of 30 minutes as the gallant steed I rode decided she wanted to be a free-range animal without the burden of an adolescent rider. She decided to head northbound at a high rate of speed and make a sharp 90-degree turn to head west.

As your fearless cowboy continued heading northbound without the helpful addition of a saddle, he remembered his recent physics class and a quote by Sir Isaac Newton: “An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and the same direction unless acted on by an unbalanced force.” Unbeknownst to me, Mr. Newton’s reference of an unbalanced force was his probably personal experience of heading northbound on a currently westbound horse and the gravitational pull on the human body toward a hard-packed terra firma.

This experience left an indelible mark on me and curtailed any hope of ever having a working relationship with the equine species.

I don’t mean to hate on horses or horse people, as they are still magnificent animals. They also have a great purpose in keeping young girls away from boys, so we have riding lessons scheduled for next week and are looking at horse trailers.