10/05/2026
To most people, it looks like a trip to the pumpkin patch. To an SDA puppy, it’s a classroom full of sights, sounds, smells, surfaces—and SO many firsts!
Today kicked off Camp Canine, the week each month when our puppies return to the SDA campus for extra learning, training, and new experiences. We love starting things off with an outing designed to build confidence, practice skills, and introduce our pups to things they may have never encountered before.
And Penton Farms is pretty much the ultimate puppy classroom!
A huge thank-you to Penton Farms for once again welcoming our service dogs in training for our annual field trip to their beautiful pumpkin patch. Penton Farms is not normally pet friendly, so we are especially grateful that they open their gates to our pups and give us this incredible opportunity each year.
The farm seems to grow every year, with amazing new vignettes and photo opportunities around every corner—but for our puppies, all those fun fall displays double as training opportunities.
Ringo, Rosco, Baby Ruth, and Razzle Dazzle experienced so many firsts today: farm and exotic animals, unfamiliar smells, giant piles of pumpkins, painted hay bales, and all kinds of interesting surfaces and challenges. They explored a bin of corn, ramps and stairs, a swinging bench, rolling tires, slick slides, and plenty more.
Every new sight, sound, smell, texture, and surface is another chance to build confidence and teach a young dog, “You’ve got this.”
And just in case the youngsters needed a little guidance, Tito and Kleo came along to supervise and show them how the pros do it.
Thank you again to Penton Farms for being such wonderful friends to Service Dogs Alabama. Your generosity gives our dogs an experience we simply couldn’t recreate on campus—and makes for one pretty amazing first day of Camp Canine!
PuppyTraining
