"Elderly people with dementia, children with autism and others may seem away from everyone, or are rarely accessible in everyday life. Some may have even become rejected because of what people regard as weird behavior. A parent who has an autistic boy once told me that people confronted with unusual behavior in public often took her to task for failing to educate her child."

In 2012 a parent came across Wu, who had already made a name for himself in the field of pet training, and hoped to take his boy to watch the dog training, because he loves dogs. Wu agreed. When the child appeared, Wu found he was unwilling to speak and did not look at others, and Wu thought the child must be introverted.

It was not until the dog appeared that the boy became a little more animated, and later his parents told Wu that he was autistic. It was Wu's first such experience in dealing with someone who is autistic, and he began to wonder whether the boy's positive reaction on seeing the dog training meant it held out more possibilities.

Later, Wu learned that treatments that did not use drugs such as animal-assisted therapy had been used in Europe and the United States for more than 100 years, but it was almost unheard of in China. He had already made a name for himself with his pet training, but he suddenly realized that there was work for him to considerably widen the scope of what he was doing.