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Instead of watching the Super Bowl this year, I decided to watch the Animal Planet Puppy Bowl, featuring puppies dragging toys around the field and scoring if they drag it to the end zone.

It made me wonder, are the puppies trained to drag toys to the end zone and play nicely with others on their team? Or are they just given free reign to do what they want and they are unaware that the goal is to get it to the end zone?

Also, are any other animals on the show trained (e.g. Half-Time show cats, cheer-leading roosters, smartphone typing parakeet)?

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  • There are plenty of articles WRT the "behind the scenes" aspect of the Puppy Bowl. Did you even bother reading any of them? – BCdotWEB Feb 8 '16 at 9:50
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    @BCdotWEB I did read a few, but they didn't mention training. – Thunderforge Feb 8 '16 at 15:04
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They aren't really trained since the dogs are all puppies who are available for adoption in shelters nationwide. But their handlers do have tricks:

Peanut butter has proved useful in luring the pups apart — or getting them to do anything, really. Spread some peanut butter on the edge of a camera lens and it’s a guaranteed adorable puppy-licking-America’s-TV-screens moment.

Animal Planet has a video showing how the kittens are choreographed and other similar ones.

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    looks like those videos are geoblocked to the US btw – Kate Gregory Feb 8 '16 at 13:10
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    While I appreciate your information about peanut butter, I'm not sure if "they're puppies available in adoption shelters" is strong enough evidence that they aren't trained. Is it possible that they are given some training and then given peanut butter to reinforce the training? Do the videos you linked to explicitly say that they aren't trained? I'm geoblocked from them. – Thunderforge Feb 8 '16 at 15:58
  • @Thunderforge That's what i also thought while answering and stopped. But still not that unreasonable either. – Ankit Sharma Feb 9 '16 at 6:03

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