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.

Is my pet a boy or a girl?

Over to the right you can see Joanna (or at least on of her relatives). Joanna is my level 70 raptor on my hunter. By happy coincidence, I named her before I confirmed that she was a she. Imagine the years of psychotherapy I'd have to fund if I'd named a male raptor Joanna. Or I guess he could write a hit country song about his mis-nomenclature.

But how do you tell the gender of your pet. Being composed of polygons drawn on a computer screen, it's difficult to "turn them over and look" like you would with a real world pet. And to some degree, it probably doesn't matter. If you name a pet "Joanna" or "Sue," it becomes by default she. And if you name a pet "Fred" or "Henry," it becomes male. But there is a way to tell. Or at least I like to think there is.

In the Wetlands, which is incidentally where Joanna grew up, there are a couple of wrecked ships full of ghostly sailors and marines. They are for a mid-20s quest from Menethil Harbor for Alliance, but I think they're probably aggro mobs for the Horde as well. One of their abilities is to curse their target turning them into an undead and some other nasty stuff.

The fun thing, is that pets subject to the curse turn not into undead raptors, cats and carrrion birds, but into undead humans. And when Joanna was subject to the curse, she was indeed a she. I've never confirmed that pets do indeed turn into different sexes, but everytime Joanna was cursed she properly turned into a female undead.

I guess it's not really important, but if you are dying to know the gender of your pet (and whether or not you're responsible for therapy bills) take it over to Wetlands and get it cursed. Then you'll know for certain.

And now, for extra cool points (which I've never given) tell my what movie reference caused me to name Joanna.