Well, it's hard to say, not knowing what you're left with or how much was taken. Pecans tend to just resprout. I don't think one side of the tree would know if the other side was missing.

They pretty much denuded its pecan bearing branches and cut the branches that were looming low to the street and the neighbor's roof. Took away about half of its leafy canopy. It is still twenty to thirty feet high, about thirty feet across. It is just missing every little fruiting twig-branch and about half its leaves!

Thank you for letting me know that pecans tend to resprout. It has maybe 50 to 100 small cuts in its bark, from where they removed the fruiting branches. I don't know that I could get to enough of the wounds to matter if tree paint is still a thing to do.

I read recently that tree wound paint retards healing so don't worry about using it on your pecan tree. I agree with Dan in that it will be fine.

However, it is recommended that it be used when cutting live oaks to keep a certain beetle from infecting the oak with 'oak wilt disease'.

That's odd that the tree has lots of small cuts. It's one thing to remove major overhanging branches. It's another thing to remove smaller fruiting branches that aren't on those major ones. Sounds like your tree got more than a trim, but also some kind of thinning.

It did get quite a thinning. A difference in understanding the meaning of the word 'suckers', I think. The men were supposed to remove and trim three large branches that were either menacing the neighbor's roof, or the tree itself, or were too low over the street and falling afoul of fire engine clearance codes. They did this, beautifully. They asked about removing suckers, and pointed to three branchlets that were sprouting up through the center of the tree at bad angles from the previous year's fruiting branches. I said yes, please remove them, because those branchlets were crossing the main branches of the tree and and rubbing against them. They removed those branchlets, but then they also took off every fruiting branch as well. In their minds, fruiting branches equaled suckers, and in my mind fruiting branches equaled NOT suckers.

Lesson learned-- supervise every cut a tree trimmer makes.