Danny’s Farm is a leading Israeli centre for holistic healing, offering animal-assisted trauma care, among other services. (photo from Danny Stirin)
After Canadian-Israeli media personality Shai DeLuca was critically wounded in 1996 during his service in the Israel Defence Forces, the instructions from his peers were as blunt as they were unhelpful: be a man, move on.
The injury – that left him with temporary loss of use of his legs – kept him in hospital and rehabilitation for nearly a year, in an era when post-traumatic stress was rarely named, let alone treated. “Back then, PTSD wasn’t understood the way it is today,” said DeLuca. “No one had language for it. No one recognized the symptoms.”
At the end of July 2025, DeLuca traveled to a ranch southeast of Rehovot, Israel, with a Canadian organization supporting IDF veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, families of Oct. 7 victims and Israelis living with trauma caused by terror. What began as just a visit to Danny’s Farm, a unique therapeutic centre, turned into a revelation.
At the end of the tour, ranch owner and chief executive officer Danny Stirin sensed something about DeLuca and asked a pointed question – why had he not dealt with the mental after-effects of his injury?
“I felt like I didn’t even need to say a lot and he understood what I meant,” recalled DeLuca. “He said, ‘the moment you’re ready, just message me. I will be there with you every step of the way.’”
The visit was “life-changing” for DeLuca and returning to the farm later allowed him “to understand parts of my own story buried for years.”
DeLuca credits Stirin as “the person who freed me in a lot of ways from a lot of weight that I’ve been carrying for so many years.”
Since its inception in 2016, Danny’s Farm has become a refuge for Israelis grappling with trauma, be it from war or terror. At first glance it looks like a ranch – stables with dozens of horses and many small animals about – but amid the pastoral view is a clinic, recognized as a leading Israeli centre for holistic, animal-assisted trauma care. Treatment rooms for art, music, bodywork and complementary medicine sit alongside the barns, and a multidisciplinary staff of psychologists, social workers and emotional-therapy instructors anchors the work with patients. The farm treats some 1,500 people each week.
Even before Oct. 7, the farm was treating children with special needs, survivors of sexual violence, and adults with complex trauma, filling a gap in an under-resourced mental-health system. Since the Hamas attacks and ensuing war, it has become a safe zone for reserve soldiers, evacuees from the south and north, and families coping with loss, dislocation and rocket fire.
For Stirin, the farm grew out of his own brush with crisis and a decision about what kind of fulfilment he sought professionally. “It’s like there’s a point in your life when you’re looking for a purpose,” he said, adding that he wanted the farm to be a tangible example for his children: “so they can see that somebody is going with his heart, all the way.”
A deeper motivation, though, was to help other people with their pain. “I felt that I have to hold the hope for others having a crisis, as I did,” he said.
Stirin’s choice to place animals at the centre of this work came from his childhood. “Since I was a boy, I had a long attraction to animals. All my life I was near them,” he said.
Born in Argentina to a grandfather who worked as a “gaucho,” or cowboy, he grew up with horses and dogs and carried that bond into adulthood. “I realized in the best way, the very powerful way, I felt the energy of the healing, just being near the simplicity of these creatures,” said Stirin.
On the farm, that idea has been formalized into a program that pairs equine therapy with group and individual treatment, and specialized tracks for traumatized children and families. The model, developed in partnership with the resilience organization Tkuma and supported by various funders, is designed to give long-term structure to people who might otherwise never access, or have access to, sustained care.
If there is a single principle guiding Danny’s Farm, it is that trauma is both ubiquitous and intensely personal. “The human soul is very fragile, and very different from one to one,” Stirin said. “The trauma … it plays with you. It can come in all kinds of different ways, shapes.”
Because the nature of trauma depends on a person’s personality, history, physical and mental structure, he said, therapists must approach treatment with “a lot of flexibility.”
“Each one needs something else. That’s what I believe,” he said.
For veterans like DeLuca, who was told to tough it out, the encounter with this kind of care was “liberating.”
Coming back to the ranch last month to introduce visiting media to the farm, he said he found at the farm the space to see his injury “through a different lens,” as part of a story that “did not have to end in silence.”
He said, “With PTSD, the challenge is not closing the door, but opening it, and dealing with it. And what Danny did was [tell] me that I don’t have to keep that door closed.”
Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world. His website is davegordonwrites.com. His trip to Israel was co-sponsored by the Or Ofir Foundation.