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MAY 2017 | SCENE 63 wellbeing. Moms and litters stay here together until weaning at six to seven weeks, when moms return to their hosts’ homes. Preschool play with purpose. Daysold puppies receive handling and stimulation here in the preschool area, and puppies up to six weeks receive multisensory activities — and plenty of playtime — in sunlit indoor and outdoor classrooms. Staff and volunteers use these spaces to expose puppies to people, sights, sounds, textures, motion, and more. Puppy kindergarten adventures. Puppies six to ten weeks old stay in 18 individual runs with access to the kindergarten classroom, where staff, volunteers, and the public conduct daily enrichment activities in the Puppy Kindergarten Adventure program. Weather permitting, kindergarten also takes place in an enclosed outdoor classroom, an interior courtyard with blue skies above. In the kindergarten complex, siblings live, learn, and play together, with plenty of time for naps in between. Making a splash. An outdoor splash park, funded solely by volunteer puppy raisers, offers puppies a multisensory water experience — and fun! Puppies love to frolic here, and visitors enjoy seeing the silliness only found in puppy play. Kindergarten graduation. The school’s Puppy Raising Services Department, housed in the Academy, matches ten-week-old puppies with volunteer puppy raisers for their next phase of training. A special “graduation” room serves as a private space to introduce puppies to their new families, sign contracts, and say goodbyes. The doctor is in. Here in the Academy clinic, puppies receive vaccinations and other minor procedures; moms receive X-rays prior to whelping; and Genetics and Reproduction staff perform lab work and reproductive procedures such as insemination and cryopreservation. Two campus veterinarians oversee the health of all campus dogs from the school’s on-site Veterinary Center as well as in this new puppy clinic. Locating this clinic within the Academy means that puppies don’t have to be transported to another building for checkups and preventative care. Something for everyone. The Southeastern Guide Dogs campus Gift Shop occupies a front corner of the new Puppy Academy, where visitors stop in for a gift for themselves, two for the dog, and three for the grandkids. Pet-friendly toys, stuffed animals, tee shirts, hats, dog treats, and plenty of other merchandise makes for a fruitful shopping stop. For this growing nonprofit, the new Puppy Academy is part of a multi-year, multi-building capital improvement program taking the campus into the future. “Our Puppy Academy is a one-of-a-kind facility built with a heavy emphasis on ‘frugal quality’ — a building that reflects our commitment to both superb stewardship and exceptional quality,” Herman explains. “In an environment enhanced by warm sunlight, privacy, and serenity, our staff and volunteers perform cuttingedge work, while future superheroes learn and grow into their very special destinies.” And what destinies they are. Guide dogs for people with visual impairments, service dogs for veterans who bear invisible scars of PTSD, facility therapy dogs offering comfort in veterans’ healthcare facilities; they all begin their journeys here at the new Southeastern Guide Dogs Puppy Academy. Because superheroes must start somewhere, and in this case, they start right here in our own backyard. Now that is magical!


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