Guide dogs trained to serve Beijing Winter Olympics

BEIJING, April 27 (Xinhua) -- Founder of a guide dog training base in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province, said that they have started training dogs to serve the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

"We've basically prepared 31 guide dogs for athletes and staff at the Games," Wang Jingyu, founder of the Dalian branch of the China Guide Dog Training Center and director of the Laboratory Animal Center at Dalian Medical University, was quoted as saying by China Daily on Tuesday.

As China's first professional guide dog training center, the Dalian base was established in 2006 on the university's campus.

To mark International Guide Dog Day, which will fall on Wednesday, trainers from the base took some guide dogs to a local park on Saturday to promote public awareness of guide dogs, Wang said.

The base has provided more than 240 free guide dogs to visually impaired people around the country since 2006.

However, it is still impossible to meet demand, Wang said. Each year, tens of thousands of visually impaired people apply to get a guide dog.