I found a small soft lump under my 7-year-old lab's skin — can I just keep an eye on it?

No — and the reason is simple: nobody can tell a benign lump from a malignant one by feel. Not you, not me, and honestly not any vet, however experienced. The lumps that turn out to be nasty very often feel exactly like the harmless ones.

The good news is that the answer here is cheap and fast. A fine-needle sample takes a couple of minutes, usually needs no sedation, and settles the question. Watch and wait is exactly how the treatable lumps become the untreatable ones, because the single biggest factor in how a skin tumour turns out is how big it was on the day it came off.

While you wait for the appointment: photograph it next to a coin for scale, measure it with a ruler and write the measurement and the date down, and mark where it is on a rough sketch of his body. Then run your hands slowly over the whole dog once a month — dogs commonly grow several, and finding them all matters more than watching one. Note whether it is soft and slides freely under the skin, or whether it feels hard and fixed to the tissue underneath.

Get it seen this week rather than next month if it is growing quickly, if the skin over it breaks down, if it feels anchored rather than mobile, or if he is off-colour in himself.

Your vet will weigh what comes back from the sample against his age and where the lump sits before recommending anything. The sample decides this, not a guess from a distance.