Wu Qi trains his dogs to better interact with people. （Photo/CHINA DAILY）
Wu Qi was debilitatingly shy when he was very young and refused to talk to most people until one day he found a newborn puppy in a trash can.
Now, the 38-year-old is cheerful, optimistic and has become known as a "dog whisperer", an animal behavior expert and a founder of China's first animal-assisted therapy program. Wu is also called "Uncle Dog" by many autistic children.
After he found the puppy, the two became good friends. He took care of the dog through elementary and high school until he went to Nanjing University in Jiangsu province, in his native Zhejiang province, to further his studies.
"I often talked to the dog and shared my life with it. It changed my introverted personality and helped make me the person I am today," he said.
Wu was heartbroken when the dog died peacefully at home. After he graduated from the university in 2003, he owned another dog and learned how to care for animals in a professional manner, including how to train them to better fit their unique environments and work together with humans.
He left his job as a computer games designer to enter the pet sector－a career decision that provided him with sufficient time to be with animals.
Wu's father, a civil servant, and his mother, a teacher, were strongly opposed to his decision to quit a well-paid job in order to raise animals. They thought his new occupation was "humiliating" for a well-educated man, and wept when they talked to him on the phone.
Wu continued with his new career, but encountered many difficulties. He failed in running two pet shops, and in 2010, he had nothing to his name but six dogs.
Wu Qi, founder of China's first animal-assisted therapy program, trains a dog in Nanjing in July last year. [Photo/CHINA DAILY]
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.
