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Diet

Every beast has a specific diet. Try to feed a cat a piece of fruit and it will refuse to eat it – however, a gorilla will happily gobble it down. To determine what sort of diet a pet has, either use the spell ‘Beast Lore,’ or mouse over the happiness icon in the pet’s character pane. There are 6 different types of food available: Bread, Cheese, Fish, Fruit, Fungus and Meat (as well as Raw Fish and Raw Meat, although for all intensive purposes, Fish and Meat are the same cooked as uncooked). Not all beasts eat every type of food, so ease of obtaining foodstuffs may be a consideration to take into account when choosing an animal companion. The breakdown is as follows:

As the table shows, some beasts, such as wolves, eat only meat. Others, like bears, will eat any type of food available.

Without taking into account faction related discounts, food from vendors are sold in stacks of 5 pieces per. The cost rises 25c, 1s25c, 5s, 10s, 20s, 40s, 56s, 64s, 80s, 85s, 1g60s, with 1g60s being the cost for 5 pieces of the highest quality food currently available. Innkeepers are often the best suppliers of various foodstuffs, although there are specialty vendors such as Butchers or Fruit Sellers.

_{Some food sold by vendors is not easily identifiable in terms of what type it is (the Night Elves seem especially guilty of this), specifically Bean Soup, Versicolor Treat, Steamed Mandu, Wild Ricecake, Heaven Peach, Darnassus Kimchi Pie, Radish Kimchi, Cabbage Kimchi and Winter Kimchi. Steamed Mandu, Heaven Peach and the Kimchis are classified as fruit, Bean Soup and Wild Ricecake are bread and the Versicolor Treat is cheese.}

Feeding

Pets are fed one of two ways – dragging and dropping food onto the pet itself (if you have a stack of food and use this method, there is no need to separate them, the pet will only consume one) or by using the Feed Pet ability, which is learned upon completion of the Taming the Beast quest line (click Feed Pet [either on your action bar or from your spellbook] and then click on whatever it is you are attempting to feed your pet).

It can also be made into a macro command.

/cast Feed Pet
/use (exact name of food)

will cause the pet to be fed only whichever food is specified by the /use command. Alternatively, if you have several different pets with varying diets, you can change the use command as follows:

/cast Feed Pet
/use [pet:species]exact name of food

So, for example, if you had a cat, wolf and boar as pets, your macro might look something like this:

/cast Feed Pet
/use [pet:cat]Feltail Delight
/use [pet:wolf]Smoked Talbuk Venison
/use [pet:boar]Conjured Mana Biscuit

Happiness

Keeping your pet well fed is important. Why? By feeding a pet, its happiness increases. A pet has three different states of happiness: Happy (where the pet deals 125% damage), Content (where the pet deals 100% damage) and Unhappy (where the pet deals 75% damage). Ideally, a hunter’s pet should always be ‘happy’. Each stage of happiness (Happy, Content and Unhappy) are all color coded to aid in assessing pet happiness at a quick glance.

Happiness from food scales like everything else – low level food gives 8 happiness each ‘bite’. The best level food gives 35 happiness each ‘bite’. As a pet gains levels, it will need higher level food for it to become happy. The higher quality the food, the more happiness a pet gets with every bite. A level 80 pet will turn up its nose at level 10 food. Conversely, a LV10 pet doesn’t need to be fed LV80 food. Feed a level 10 pet food appropriate to that level (such as Rough Jerky or Tough Hunk of Bread) and it will gain 35 happiness. The secondary professions Cooking and Fishing can both be very useful to the Hunter. Cooking food (using pieces of meat dropped by various NPCs for example) will turn it into higher quality foodstuffs than if the meat was simply fed to the pet without cooking it. And fishing up a meal for your pet is less expensive than purchasing fish from a vendor.

Keep in mind, that a pet does not need to be force fed. Allow it to finish eating one piece of food before giving it another (when a pet is fed, it will gain an icon under its portrait that says ‘Feed Pet effect’ – once this vanishes, another piece of food can be given to the pet. This can also be monitored in the chat window, under ‘Periodic Effects’ then ‘Your Periodic Buffs’). Once a pet becomes happy, feeding can stop. A pet’s happiness will decrease over time, more rapidly if the pet is killed or killed repeatedly.

Normally, pets do not gain any additional bonuses from eating food, even if said food says that that it provides a bonus once consumed – this only applies to players. There are a few exceptions to this: Kibler’s Bits, Sporeling Snacks and Spiced Mammoth Treats. Sporeling Snack is a cooking recipe sold by Mycah, the Sporeggar Quartermaster in Zangarmarsh and requires Strange Spores. The snack increases the Stamina and Spirit of your pet by 20 and lasts for 30 minutes. Kibler’s Bits is a cooking recipe obtained randomly from completing The Rokk’s daily cooking quests in Shattrah City and requires Buzzard Meat. The bits increases the Strength and Stamina of your pet by 20 and lasts for 1 hour. Spiced Mammoth Treats is a cooking recipe sold by Arille Azuregaze, Derek Odds and Misensi in Daleran for the cost of three Daleran Cooking Awards (obtained by completing the daily cooking quest in Daleran). The treats increase the Strength and Stamina of your pet by 30, lasts for 1 hour and requires Chunk o’ Mammoth and Northern Spices.

Make sure you right click these items, feeding it to your pet via the ‘Feed Pet’ ability will not have the same effect (in fact, the message should appear that your pet doesn’t like that food).