Having a realistic understanding of what your dog needs will allow you to adjust your expectations about your dog. The big picture of your dog’s L.E.G.S.® can help you to authentically prepare for the life you will share together. You can learn what you might expect from your dog’s learning, environment, genetics, and self. You will both be better off if you have a clearer idea about what could be coming down the pike. It is really just about being honest, and finding the terms you can agree on, based on the needs and limitations you both have. Trust is what happens when, time and time again, you meet in the middle.

At the same time, for all the many benefits of expectations, do your best to remain flexible about them. Be willing to be wrong, and you may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Your dog could always be the exception, the one that breaks the mold. Nature does that from time to time.

There are no fixed rules, only guiding insights and information from which we can piece together a more logical and complete framework of ideas. The point here is to simply develop more realistic expectations of your canine friend. The last thing you want is to set him up for failure time and again because you are simply misinformed, unaware of what you have been missing.

The mysteries of our dogs’ behaviors and our relationships with them are far from solved. But we have a whole lot more to go on than we did. Dedicated researchers, scientists, and professionals have provided us with more useful grist for the mill than we had in the past. You may as well be given the chance to take it all in and try to use it, for your dog’s sake as well as your own.

This book isn’t exhaustive. But it is, I hope, highly provocative—a catalyst for a paradigm shift in our current thinking about dogs. My hope is that it can be the ice-breaking, cage-shaking, appetite-whetting first step toward a new and more successful road for people and their canine companions—for you and your dog. L.E.G.S.® is simply the beginning, an introduction.

You already love your dog (or will soon if you are thinking about taking him home). Now I would like you to meet your dog. As best you can. Halfway. Equipped with the kind of sensible expectations and appropriate measures that may make life easier for both of you. Hopefully I can spare you some heartache with what I have learned from science, from practice, and from so many amazing dogs and their owners. Your relationship will always have its ups and downs, as any relationship will. But if I can open your eyes to your dog’s perspective, even a little bit more, and in doing so bring you closer, then this book has made the difference I have dreamed for it to make.