This Is What It's Really Like at the Puppy Bowl

Updated on 2/5/2017 at 12:05 PM

POPSUGAR Photography | Hedy Phillips

The Puppy Bowl is the best part of Super Bowl Sunday. If you think differently, you're wrong. I mean, football is OK, but puppies! And kitties! Rolling around on a tiny football field! Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl will air, as always, on Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 5, and it will feature shelter dogs and cats. Animal Planet films this spectacular feature in advance of February, and I got to be a lucky viewer. If you can contain your jealousy of my adventure (I won't blame you if you can't), scroll through to see some behind-the-scenes shots and find out what really happens at the taping. And don't forget to tune in to Animal Planet on Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. EST to see all this cuteness come together!

The show is filmed over the course of two days.

Day one was all about filming the kittens for the halftime show. Day two was a daylong puppy shoot.

The kittens are just as destructive as the kittens you have at home.

Production assistants had to keep fixing pieces of the set that the kitties were ripping apart. No surprise there!

It's pretty silent on set.

On kitten day, the only sound was the whirring of the electronic kitty toys. No meowing, no talking, no anything. On puppy day, while I was there, there was hardly any barking. Just so much playing!

In the holding area, I got to play with all the animals.

And when I say all of them, I mean the kitties, the puppies, some bunnies, and a few guinea pigs. It was practically a zoo behind the scenes, and it was amazing.

There is a lot of this happening in the holding area.

Playing in the Puppy Bowl is hard work, you know?

The puppies are filmed in groups.

The crew spends all day filming the puppies in groups. I watched the last group film, which was a bunch of rambunctious big pups.

It takes a LOT of people to make this work.

There are many, many volunteers who line the stage to make sure the puppies stay on the field, not to mention all the crew who are doing the filming.

Accidents happen on set.

Listen, they're baby animals, of course there are accidents while filming.

All the animals are shelter animals.

And by the time the show airs in February, all of the animals will have found homes. Several of them had actually already found homes by the time of the taping, which is amazing news!

It's actually magical

Seriously, there are baby animals everywhere — what more could you ask for?