On a rainy Sunday morning last month, a group of local military veterans and first responders gathered at Warrior Ranch in Calverton to learn a new language.

Their teachers weighed about 1,200 pounds each.

For a decade, Eileen Shanahan has been bringing those two groups together: veterans and first responders – some carrying trauma, grief and the accumulated stress of lives spent serving others – and horses that may arrive at the ranch abused, neglected or abandoned. The premise is reciprocal: The people help rehabilitate and retrain troubled horses so they can eventually move on to permanent homes, while the horses can help people slow down, lower their guard, communicate and begin working through experiences they have carried for years.

“It’s a second chance for both human and horse,” Shanahan said.

On this wet August morning, an idea – a dream, really – that began with one woman and one horse had grown into a sprawling operation with more than a half million dollars in net assets, according to tax records, that has helped to heal hundreds of traumatized souls through equine therapy.

Around the barn were retired cops and firefighters, military veterans, volunteers, family members and dedicated staffers. Suffolk County police officer Anthony Cerullo and his wife Allison, a former county 911 operator, were there with their young son, an adorable little boy splashing around the ranch in bright yellow rain boots. Their first-born son died two years ago of a rare genetic disease, when he was 17 months old. The ranch planted a Honeycrisp apple tree on the property in memory. The couple are regular visitors to the ranch.

Nearby, Gina Lamb, the ranch’s equine specialist, was preparing everyone for their morning with the horses. Stand near the shoulder, she said. Never sneak up on a horse. Let the animal know you are approaching. Extend a hand for what Lamb called the “cowboy hello.” Never wrap a lead rope around your hand. And watch. Watch the ears, the head, the feet and the tail. Learn what the horse is telling you.

Nobody rode that morning. They groomed the animals, led them, backed them up and learned to communicate through body language and intention, which is the groundwork at the heart of Warrior Ranch’s programs.

Shanahan had seen enough mornings like this to know how they will often unfold. She pointed out one participant who had arrived looking guarded and a little stiff and predicted that within a few hours he would be smiling and relaxed. She has watched people arrive skeptical, sometimes literally standing with their arms folded as if daring someone to prove what a horse could possibly do for them, only to be grinning and engaged by the end of the afternoon.

The horses undergo transformations of their own.

“They have to learn to feel comfortable and feel that they’re safe,” Lamb said. “Just like people.”

This year, Warrior Ranch is celebrating its 10th anniversary, having served nearly 600 veterans and first responders who have participated in its programs, according to Shanahan. An Oct. 4 fundraiser will mark the milestone and help support the ranch’s programs.

The nonprofit has two full-time employees, one part-time employee, several contractors and a pool of about 100 volunteers. What started out as occasional gatherings in her backyard has grown into an operation that keeps its core team busy seven days a week.

Looking around the Calverton property today – at the barn and paddocks, horses, staff, volunteers and participants – it’s hard to imagine what Shanahan sees when she looks at it. She was there at the beginning, with an idea, and it took an enormous leap of faith for her to get from there to here.

Warrior

She grew up in a family where military and public service were part and parcel of everyday life. Her father was a Marine reservist, an uncle was a Navy commander and her brother served in the Navy. She has three nephews who became Marines and another who joined the Army, while police officers, firefighters and nurses fill out her extended family.

“We were just always taught to give back,” Shanahan said.

Her father was involved with the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation from its beginnings in 1962, when a few Marines got together and raised money to help pay for college for the child of one of their own. Shanahan got involved in the mid-1990s and has been working with the organization ever since.

By the time Shanahan got Warrior in 2003, he had suffered years of a brutal existence at the hands of an alcoholic who kept him in the woods and fed him potato skins. The horse had been cut up by barbed wire and burned with cigarettes. He repeatedly escaped, eventually turning up at the home of a woman who later paid the owner $1,500 for him. After another change of hands, Shanahan took him in.

She loved horses, but she didn’t yet understand them, she said, grinning at the memory.

“I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

Warrior was also going blind, though she didn’t know it then. Just as she was beginning to learn how to work with him, something spooked Warrior during a training exercise. He spun around suddenly and his head smashed into Shanahan’s face, breaking her nose and orbital bone badly enough that she still has a titanium plate in her face.

Her physical injuries healed more quickly than her fears. Shanahan said that just seeing Warrior back then could make her feel like her legs might buckle, and it took about a year before she got back on a horse. The accident forced her to find some way to better understand her horse.

“I’ve got to learn what I’m doing, or I’m gonna die,” she remembers thinking.

She immersed herself in natural horsemanship, an approach built around understanding how horses communicate and using body language, pressure and release to work with them. Drawing on decades working in television, she did what any good reporter would do. She launched a show called “Talkin’ Horses,” sought out experienced horsemen and women and peppered them with every question she could think of.

Last year, she released a documentary that premiered at Suffolk Theater in Riverhead, Warrior – A Battle Against Trauma: Learning to Love and Trust Again, about the ranch and its namesake horse.

‘Do what you can with what you have’

For years, Shanahan treated her idea as a fantasy. If she ever won the lottery, she thought, she would rescue horses and create a program for military veterans.

Her older sister, Maureen Anderson, told her to start where she was. The sisters knew that the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation was born out of an effort to help one Marine send one child to college. Why couldn’t Shanahan start with one soldier and one horse?

“Do what you can with what you have,” Anderson told her.

Shanahan began inviting veteran friends and others to spend time around her horse. At a barbecue, a conversation she had with a pair of military vets changed everything.

She was talking with a Marine and a Navy SEAL about her plan to rescue horses, retrain them and eventually find them permanent homes. The veterans who participated wouldn’t just be coming somewhere to receive help, she explained. They would be helping the horses. The vets’ reaction surprised her.

“You mean I’d be helping that horse?” one asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Not only would you be helping them physically, you’d be helping them find another home.”

She said their eyes lit up.

“That was the moment that I knew I was on to something.”

Her original vision was ambitious: a residential ranch where homeless veterans could stay for six months, work around the property and meet regularly with a psychologist while rebuilding their lives. A Marine she respected gave her good counsel, she told the Sun. Why wait until a veteran had become homeless? Focus on post-traumatic stress. Reach people earlier.

Without the need for housing or a residential clinical staff, she realized she could stop waiting for the money and property that she’d need to build the ranch she had imagined and just begin with horses and veterans in her own backyard.

She bought the Warrior Ranch website domain in 2012 in an attempt, she said, to “manifest the idea,” and began more serious research and organizational work in 2014. Warrior Ranch formally incorporated in 2016, with Shanahan expanding the original vision to include first responders as well as veterans.

‘Only time tells’

She said was figuring everything out in real time.

“I had no idea what the hell I was doing,” she said, again, with a big smile. “I really had no clue.”

She had studied natural horsemanship, researched equine-assisted programs and sought advice from mental health professionals. But some of her most important lessons came from the participants themselves.

Shanahan initially thought she should teach them horsemanship. Instead, she discovered many weren’t interested in riding. They wanted to groom a horse, walk beside one, learn to move one or simply stand with one.

So she adapted the plan. The emphasis increasingly became groundwork — learning to communicate with an animal acutely sensitive to posture, movement and energy. For some participants, that means slowing their breathing or becoming mindful of tension they may not have realized they were carrying. For the horses, meanwhile, being groomed, handled and worked with by different people can help prepare them for futures beyond Warrior Ranch.

“We’re about our veterans and first responders, absolutely,” Shanahan said. “We’re also about the horses.”

Lamb has watched Shanahan’s vision develop from another angle. The two women met more than 20 years ago through their shared interest in natural horsemanship. In 2020, shortly after Warrior Ranch moved onto its Calverton property, Shanahan invited Lamb to check it out.

It was a “raw mess,” Lamb remembered, filled with dirt and fallen trees and bearing little resemblance to what exists today. Shanahan asked whether Lamb could bring over a couple of her own horses for the nascent program, and she gladly obliged. Then Shanahan called again. And again.

“Next thing you know,” Lamb said, “I just kept coming back.”

Today, Lamb is Warrior Ranch’s equine specialist and assesses and trains horses that enter the program. Some arrive fearful, and others have been badly neglected or abandoned. Often, Lamb knows little about what happened to them.

“They can’t tell you,” she said.

So she watches and waits.

“It is like peeling an onion layer by layer. Only time tells.”

Some horses need months before Lamb considers them ready to work around participants, and some never are. One horse, she said, simply couldn’t tolerate large groups and all the emotions surrounding him, so Warrior Ranch found another purpose for the animal.

But others settle in and thrive.

‘A blessing’

Some people come to Warrior Ranch for camaraderie, stress relief or just the chance to spend a few hours outdoors with others who understand the lives they have led, Shanahan said. Others arrive carrying far heavier burdens.

Years ago, a veteran called Shanahan and asked whether she could come see Cody, one of Shanahan’s horses. Shanahan said yes, put a lead line on Cody and handed it to the woman, and the two set off walking in a park.

For 45 minutes, they walked in silence.

“Not a word was said,” Shanahan recalled.

On the way back, the woman began making small talk, but not about what had brought her there. Only later did Shanahan learn the truth: the veteran had been suicidal, and a fellow veteran had repeatedly urged her to call Shanahan.

The experience left Shanahan deeply humbled.

“Just be kind,” she said, “because you have no idea the battles that people are fighting.”

Anthony and Allison Cerullo found Warrior Ranch under different circumstances. Their first son died at 17 months from a rare genetic disease. Allison was seven months pregnant with their second son when the family received the diagnosis, Anthony said, and they were put in contact with Warrior Ranch.

“This place has been a blessing for us.”

An army of volunteers

In November 2017, Shanahan said, she introduced the program to then-Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, an Army veteran. She showed him a rendering of what Warrior Ranch might become.

“Come on,” she told him. “Don’t you want to be a part of this?”

Bellone asked what she needed, and the answer came swiftly.

“Property and funding.”

County officials eventually showed her the Calverton site, but it took until October 2019 to finalize an agreement. At points during the nearly two-year process, Shanahan said, she came close to giving up. But getting the property was half the battle. The next challenge was turning it into a ranch.

Operating Engineers Local 138 brought in heavy equipment and cleared portions of the overgrown land. Suffolk Security Systems installed a free security system, while Riverhead Building Supply also provided assistance, along with many other local businesses, Shanahan said. Volunteers mowed, painted, built, repaired and tackled the seemingly endless jobs that accompany horses and acreage.

Judy McCleery photos

Many of those volunteers were veterans and first responders themselves. The people Warrior Ranch had been created to serve helped build the place that would serve them. Shanahan now estimates the organization has a volunteer pool of about 100, with about 30 helping regularly and others turning out for events and projects throughout the year.

Retired police officer Tim Galvin is one of them. Galvin spent 31 years in law enforcement and about two decades as a mounted officer. Not long after Warrior Ranch began, he saw something about the organization on News 12 and drove out to investigate.

On his first visit, someone asked whether he knew how to drive a tractor and cut grass.

“So I spent the day cutting grass,” Galvin recalled, “and I’ve been coming here ever since.”

Years later, he still makes a roughly 100-mile round trip to Warrior Ranch, sometimes four or five times a month.

“I love it,” Galvin said, looking around. “I love it.”

Lamb has watched the physical transformation happen around her. Six rescue horses have entered the program during her time there, she said, with four already adopted. Chevy is among the latest.

When trainers first tried to load him onto a trailer, Shanahan said, it took about 90 minutes. Eventually, he learned to do it in about five. After nearly two years at Warrior Ranch, Chevy is now leaving for a permanent home, where he will become a trail horse.

Another horse can eventually take his place, but Shanahan is adamant that expansion will never come at the expense of the animals. Warrior Ranch keeps enough money reserved to feed and care for each horse for at least two years.

“We will not be a rescue that needs rescuing,” she said.

Warrior’s legacy

Warrior never left.

The horse who started Shanahan down this path lived to approximately 35 and died in 2021. His death was devastating, Shanahan said, but not unexpected. By then, the horse who could once buckle her knees in fear helped determine the direction of her life. The whole ranch bears his name.

After Warrior Ranch moved onto the Calverton property, its sign was installed on May 22, 2020. Only as it was happening, she said, did Shanahan realize the significance of the date: May 22, 2003 was the day Warrior came into her life.

For more information about the ranch, or to find out how you can help or watch Shanahan’s 2025 documentary, visit the Warrior Ranch website.