March 23 was a busy day at the Canine Companions Northeast Training Center in Medford. Not only was it National Puppy Day, but the training center was also hosting one of their bi-monthly puppy classes, where over a dozen future service dogs, from 8 weeks old to about a year and a half, learned from professional instructors.

To celebrate National Puppy Day, Canine Companions set up a live puppy cam of a newborn litter of 8-week-olds. And while the puppy cam may be over, anyone interested can visit https://canine.org/puppy/ to see some highlights.

One of the stars of the show at the training session was pup Gallant, who was the youngest puppy at the session. Volunteer puppy raiser Nancy Barthold, 60, of Queens, said she decided to volunteer after one of her friends raised some pups in memory of his wife. Barthold never had dogs of her own before Gallant, but has been walking them since she was 15.

Brooke Stern and pup Nutmeg recently made the move from North Carolina to Long Island together, with puppy raiser Stern saying she was so glad to have Nutmeg on the journey with her. Stern decided to volunteer with Canine Companions because every time she saw one of their dogs, she was impressed by their obedience and mannerisms.

“I love it,” Stern said of raising Nutmeg. “It’s just as life-altering for her as it is for me. She’s the best puppy to learn with.”

The puppies at training are on the journey to becoming service dogs for people with disabilities. Hailey Garner, 28, of northern Virginia, is an apprentice instructor at the Northeast Training Center. Garner has been at the Medford campus since June of 2020 and is on her fourth string of dogs.

“What I do, I spend my day training my string of dogs,” Garner said. “I currently have six dogs. So, what my day consists of is splitting up time between training them. They learn about 40 commands here in professional training, so we have a nice schedule; that way, they’re introduced to commands at an appropriate rate. So, we’ll spend our days doing training sessions and we give our dogs yard time. We go out into our community play yards and they get to run together with different toys, and it’s also training for them on how to play appropriately. So, even though it’s fun for the dogs, it’s still training; that way, they know what’s appropriate and not appropriate.”

Garner, who began her Canine Companions journey as a volunteer puppy raiser at 21, said her favorite part of the job is seeing how far the dogs come, as well as when they get to meet their graduates that they are matched with.

“Just seeing how far they’ve come in their training and seeing their confidence grow, and then when you’re teaching a team training class where the dogs are matched with their graduates, seeing the bond that they have transferred over from the trainer to them and seeing how happy the dogs make our graduates, it’s just the best thing,” Garner said. “I wish we could broadcast what it’s like to be in our team trainings. It’s really heartwarming.”