Autistic Children warm to Canine companions

With friends' support, he started to run a pet-training school in Nanjing's Jianye district in 2011. To improve his dog-training skills, he visited experts in places such as the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

He gradually learned the meanings of different sounds that dogs make, improved his training skills and became known in the industry. Television stations invited him on to their shows and he started to receive phone calls from audience members.

"Seven years ago, I received a call from a woman who asked if she could bring her son to the training school to see the dogs. She said the child loved dogs, and I agreed to her request," Wu said.

"But later I found it strange that the child was interested in nothing but the dogs. He refused to talk to me and ignored me. He only became active when the dogs were around.

"His mother later said that she hadn't told me about her son's autism in advance because she was afraid that I might discriminate against him."

Wu said this was his first experience of an autistic child, and it reminded him of his introverted boyhood and how his dog had changed him. "I started to think that dogs could be channels for us to communicate with autistic children," he added.

He started to visit psychologists and teachers in special schools for autistic children, learned about animal-assisted therapy, or AAT, and contacted many institutions to offer his help.

As he expected, some institutions refused his assistance and said that they had never heard of such a therapy. Some even thought that he was a fraud.

"While AAT had been practiced in some Western countries for more than 100 years, few Chinese had heard about it or shown an interest in adopting it. Some institutions that knew about the therapy were also worried that it might not be sufficiently safe," Wu said.