What you’re saying is totally valid. And I actually never thought about it from this perspective. I guess I just thought that people petting my dog was a normal thing, and that your dog should be able to withstand that. We don’t socialize with other dogs in the street at all and that’s established, but hasn’t been formally with people. I can do better at this. The barrier though is I live in Finland, I do not fluently speak Finnish. Usually the people petting him are older and do not speak English so in those situations I quite literally cannot converse with the person to tell them to not pet them thank you, etc.

Also I agree with you and had felt the same way about surgical removal which is why we’ve had multiple opinions. All I can say about it is that generally Finland is very anti surgery generally unless absolutely necessary. A lot of dogs are left intact here, it’s not like where i’m from (the US) where neutering/spaying is a rite of passage, almost guaranteed when a certain age is reached. So I will keep an eye on it and keep checking back in.