Don't worry, my pet won't bite

A hunter in my guild sent me a question the other night about why his new pet bat (on an alt of his) wouldn't or couldn't learn bite. I asked a few questions and tried to answer his questions, but in the end couldn't come up with the right set of questions to ask as I was waiting to begin Karazhan. I promised to address his question here when I had more time to think of it.

Just for the record, the vast majority of my data and research for this article comes from Petopia. This is an awesome resource for hunters and if you'd don't use it, well, up yours.

Getting a pet to learn skill takes a couple of things. First, you as the hunter must have trained a pet that has the skill you want to teach. That is, if you've never had a pet that comes with a skill, like bite, you can't train it. Petopia will give you a list of pet families that can learn each skill and particular animals that are tamed aleady knowing a skill. The second thing you must have is enough training points to teach the skill. Rank 1 of most skills is 1 point. However, pets that have recently been trained may be too rebellious to have a positive total of points.

I have no evidence to support this, however, I recall training new pets and having them have negative points upon training. It takes them gaining loyalty to increase the points.

I suspect that this hunter is having the problem of knowing the skill, but the bat being too rowdy to actually be able to learn it. This is a problem with loyalty, not inability.

So, what's the best way to gain loyalty? Keep them happy! And the way to a pet's heart is through the stomach. Don't let the mood go to yellow or red, it must be green. In fact to keep happiness maximized, I feed the pet. Once they are no longer gaining happiness from that, I feed them again. The red/yellow/green indicator is really only ranges on the continuum of happiness levels.

Pulling numbers from thin air, say happiness can have numeric values from 1 to 1000. Dividing that up into three segments would mean that from happiness 1 to 333, the pet's mood is red. From 334-667 the mood is yellow; 668-1000 is a green mood.

The moment your pet's happiness goes above 667, the mood will be green. However, there is still a full range of happiness there to exploit. Keep feeding the pet until it stops gaining happiness at all (it'll show up in your combat log).

Then go engage mobs. Your pet should start working its way through the various loyalty levels from Rebellious (loyalty 1) to Best Friend (loyalty 6). Mania, who runs Petopia, discovered the chart for pet loyalty. It's avaialable on WowWiki.

So, unnamed hunter alt in my guild, I hope this helps. If not, hit me up in game and we'll consult the big guns.