For the past 13 years, the Puppy Bowl has offered viewers the mental massage of watching 90 adorable dogs tumble across a tiny AstroTurf field, carrying squeaky toys to victory across the end zone.

But what you don’t see are the extreme lengths animal trainers must go to in order to achieve maximum cuteness, playful antics antics and even usable footage.

“We tend not to show the peeing and pooping, but there’s a lot of that,” said Puppy Bowl show runner Simon Morris. “And there’s quite a bit of humping, so we don’t normally show that.”

The production can turn into a literal zoo. New to this year’s event, airing Sunday at 3 p.m. on Animal Planet, is a piano-playing chicken, baby barnyard animal cheerleaders and Shirley the sloth — who will join long-time referee Dan Schachner as the two call the shots and flag the penalties, like his favorite, “siesta on the sideline.”

“[Napping] happens more than you would think, as crazy as it is with all the noise,” said Schachner. “It’s so darn cute to watch a puppy sleep we just don’t stop them any more.”

Morris, who used to produce for Bravo’s “Don’t Be Tardy,” a spinoff of “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” says it can be a real challenge to produce dramatic moments to compete with the Super Bowl.

“With humans, you’re always wanting those real arguments, but in Puppy Bowl, no one’s really fighting and arguing,” he said.

Morris got his theatrics this year when the team pulled off the biggest challenge of the whole show: getting a majority of the puppies to sit still for the national anthem. To accomplish the feat, a trainer held a treat above a camera, and got the dogs gaze upward at it, as if looking toward the heavens.

“You really believe these are patriotic pooches who love their country,” Morris said.
The puppies were far from the only animals that required some production finesse. When it came time to producing the Kitten Halftime Show, which involved about 20 rescue kittens, Morris and his team were presented with the age-old problem of getting felines to seem interested in anything – let alone a rousing song-and-dance number.
“Even if they’re just nodding their heads, you’ll see all these grown adults cheering at monitors in the control room saying, ‘we got the shot!’” Morris said.
And, Schachner said he knew his assistant referee, Shirley the Sloth, would be sluggish – her handlers had to use grapes to motivate her to the end zone for calls, and even then, it took about 20 minutes. But he learned a valuable sloth trait in his time with Shirley.
“Sloths aren’t even slow. They’re just extremely efficient,” he said, explaining that sloths don’t expend unnecessary energy on trivial things like calling penalties. But there was one thing worthy of her efforts: “Be careful with the grape, she’ll snap. It was like a shark coming out of the water.”

Filmed in October in Midtown, the show is the product of months of work, starting in the summer when producers scout pups from animal shelters around the country. In terms of casting, it helps if the contenders like playing with toys and are sociable, but cuteness is the ultimate decider, Morris said.

When shelters find out their puppies have been drafted for the game, it can mean an instant boost in adoption rates.

“It was like finding out your kid won a championship,” said Krista MacDonald, director of rescue programs for Badass Brooklyn Animal Rescue, which got two of their puppies — Blueberry Pie and Peach Pie (a k a Jennifer Pawrence) — into the show this year.

In the past, by the time the show has aired, the puppies are almost always already off the market. Sometimes, the adoption happens before the game even finishes filming.
Sydney Baldwin, a publicity coordinator for Discovery Channel, was one of about 100 employees who helped the five-day shoot come together in October. But then she met Mango, the show’s first international dog, who was rescued from the streets of Mexico and nursed back to health in time for the competition.

“It started off as work, and then I admittedly stopped working at noon when I signed the adoption papers,” said Baldwin, 24, of East Harlem. “He was this little 9-pound nugget, just keeping to himself. I ended up falling in love.”