It also functioned well as a metaphor for growing up/loss of innocence. I’m not sure how well it will go trying to explore that theme further using the same metaphor.
This “Don’t worry he’s nice” shit is pretty irresponsible imo. Ignoring the fact that animals are still unpredictable regardless of their track record, people can sometimes have real trauma with dogs and letting your dog just trot up to people willy nilly could really upset someone. Also something could happen to the “nice” dog if the person or other animal isn’t nice and frankly the owner of the nice dog would have only themselves to blame.