Feed Pet

File:Ability Hunter BeastTraining.png

Feed Pet allows hunters to maintain the happiness and loyalty levels of their pets. Your pet's happiness and loyalty will increase their ability to fight which will impact how rapidly you gain experience levels. Pets get a bonus to their base abilities when happy and a negative to their base abilities when unhappy. If either of these two pet stats dip below certain default percentages, the pet will become unruly and will eventually abandon the Hunter. Thus, it is vital to the use of a pet to have the ability to feed the pet.

Source

You can gain the Feed Pet ability at level 10 by completing the Hunter training quests. In the hunter pet taming quest chains, you gain the [Tame Beast] ability when you have tamed your third quest pet and returned to the trainer. In addition to the Tame Beast ability, you get a 'go, see' quest to see another hunter trainer. That short 'go, see' quest rewards you with the Feed Pet ability. So, you gain the Tame Beast ability before you gain the Feed Pet ability, and you can tame a pet before you can feed it, but the result is an unhappy pet that you cannot make happy nor loyal, and will eventually leave you, unless and until you complete the final leg of the quest chain. So make sure to complete the quest line before trying to tame a pet.

Functionality

One can keep track of a pet's happiness level easily using the happy face icon beside the pet's display on the UI.
- Also, in the pet's attributes dialog, the happiness icon also shows the food types a given pet will consume.

Left click on the Feed Pet icon (in your spellbook or if you put it in your action bar), then left click on a food item. This will feed your pet and increase your pet's happiness (and, in turn, loyalty).

or

Drag a food item from your backpack and drop it either on your pet portrait or on the pet itself in the game world. Besides being very intuitive it has the advantage of avoiding the use of a Feed Pet icon button/keybinding/macro.

Feeding your pet does not increase its happiness instantly. A "Feed Pet Effect" buff appears (you have to target your pet to see it, it is not on the smaller portrait attached to yours) and a countdown timer sweep is shown on the buff icon. Wait for the "Feed Pet Effect" buff on your pet to disappear or watch the Combat Log for "Feed Pet Effect fades".

Limitations

Pets cannot be fed in combat. You can feed a pet in the same circumstances that you can eat.
The "Feed Pet Effect" buff disappears if the pet deals/receives any damage, wasting the feeding.
The green smiley face (happy pet) is the highest happiness, and there is not much point to feeding beyond that. You can either wait for the pet to be merely satisfied (yellow, neutral face) and feed it then, or you can feed it at intervals while it is still green if you want to try to anticipate the happiness countdown.
Pets do not gain much happiness being fed food below their level. If the food is too low, they will refuse to eat it.
- This means feeding your pet can get very expensive quickly.
Pets will eat food above their level, but gain no extra benefit.
Having to keep food for your pet requires you to use up slots in your bags for food, limiting what you can carry.
- Having a pet that can eat food you can harvest while leveling mitigates this.
Most pets eat only certain kinds of foods.
- A very few pets, boars and bears, will eat any kind of food from every major food category.
- With the introduction of 'raw fish' and 'raw meat', no pet eats every kind of food.
- Detailed listing follows.

Feeding Tips

Food for pets can be purchased from vendors. Vendors typically only sell one type of food, and finding the specific vendor(s) your pet needs can be problematic for pets with restrictive diets.
You can take a pet that eats meat and hunt mobs that drop meat. These are the easiest to maintain.
You can take up Fishing and choose a pet that will eat fish. This will save money as compared to buying food, but fishing can take a lot of time, so there's a trade off.
Pets that eat bread can eat food conjured by mages.
Keep your pet happy and loyal.
- Monitor the Combat Log of your chat box to see how much happiness your pet gets from the food. Gains are either 8, 17, or 35 per tick.
Pets which eat meat will eat the meat which is not food to you (no health restored tooltip), uncooked (for example, [Mystery Meat]). It is frequently top tier, happiness wise, if the mobs are your pet's level.
If your pet eats fish, cooked fish is amazingly cheap at fishing-related vendors. For example, a full stack of [Longjaw Mud Snapper] is less than 1 silver and pets up to 36 will eat it for middle (17 per tick) happiness gain.
If your pet has a DoT debuff (from a poison or bleed effect), make sure to use [Mend Pet] or wait for the DoT effect to end before feeding it. Otherwise, the next tick of damage will cancel the Feed effect.