Learning hard lessons from veteran vets in the countryside

Inspired by a scene in a Soviet film that showed cattle and sheep roaming on a prairie under a blue sky and white clouds, He Jingrong, from Beijing, decided to specialize in caring for livestock when she went to university.

"I thought what a nice job it would be," said He, an 80-something retiree who was a senior vet at China Agricultural University Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Beijing's Haidian district.

She enrolled at China Agricultural University to study Western veterinary science in 1958.