Team Training at the Whitaker Center

Floating beach balls, earthquakes and hurricane force winds, giant sneezing clowns - our new service dog teams in training encountered all of these things yesterday. Where were they? The Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts!

The Whitaker Center is a wonderful outing for the teams in training because not only do the teams get to practice in a challenging environment, but it's a lot of fun, too!

Each team paired up with an experienced trainer or volunteer and worked their way through all three levels of the Whitaker Center's Science Center. The Science Center is full of things that could potentially be very distracting or even scary for the dogs. For example, as soon as you walk into the Science Center from the information desk, there's a display where you can push a button and a stream of air will shoot up to make a beach ball float in the air. The dogs did very well at this display. They were curious about the floating ball but not so curious that they didn't respond to their partners.

Other areas gave the teams opportunities to practice other skills. SSD Snow practiced pushing buttons, Aladdin did under at the Legos table, Bella practiced take it to pick up a dropped Lego block, Sonora did up on the slide and Aurora showed off leave it at the wiffle balls spinning in a giant funnel.

Watch a video of the teams at the Whitaker Center.

Thank you to the Whitaker Center for donating the tickets for our service dog teams!