Feeding Your Pet
Remember when you were young and you brought home a turtle you found down the street and you begged your mother to let you keep it, and she eventually said yes but only, only if you fed it and took proper care of it yourself? Well, hunter pets in World of Warcraft are like that too -- you only get to keep a pet if you care for it properly, and the most important part of proper care is feeding your pet.
Why is Feeding Important?
Feeding your pet is important because food is the primary way to raise the happiness of your pet. We discuss happiness in depth in another article [unfortunately an article I haven't written yet -ed.], but happiness has several effects:
- Happier pets do more damage.
- Happier pets gain loyalty, while unhappy pets lose loyalty.
If you don't feed your pet it will be unhappy, do less damage, and eventually run away. So feed your pet!
When to Feed Your Pet
The goal of feeding your pet is to keep it happy, so you will want to feed your pet whenever it isn't happy. You can tell what mood your pet is in by looking at the little face icon to the right of your pet's portrait.
| Mood | Icon | Action |
| Unhappy |  |
You should feed as soon as you can! |
| Content |  |
You'll want to feed your pet when you have a chance. |
| Happy |  |
Everything is good -- no feeding necessary yet! |
In particular, you will want to feed a new pet as soon as you tame it. But happiness also wears off over time, so keep an eye on your pet's mood. Although you don't have to feed your pet when he is already happy, you may sometimes want to -- if, for instance, the last piece of food just barely made him happy and you don't want to have to stop and feed him again in just a few minutes. Below in "The Feed Pet Effect" we discuss how you can tell when you pet is completely full.
How to Feed Your Pet
In order to feed your pet you will need to learn the skill "Feed Pet". Feed Pet is a Beast Mastery skill that you gain when you complete the second part of the level 10 Hunter quests (usually called "Training the Beast"). It's very important that you do both parts of the level 10 Hunter quests before you tame a pet specifically so you learn Feed Pet. After you learn Feed Pet you can find it in your Spellbook on the Beast Mastery tab. The icon looks like a bone-shaped doggie biscuit.
You can feed your pet in one of two ways:
- Click the Feed Pet skill and you will get a glowing hand cursor. (You can right-click to cancel this cursor if you change your mind.) Then click on an appropriate food item in your inventory or hot bar.
- Or drag an appropriate food item from your inventory into the 3D world as if you were going to delete it, then click on either your pet's portrait or on your pet's body.
What to Feed Your Pet
What's an appropriate food? Well, each family of pets will only eat certain types of food that fall within their diet. In addition, higher level pets will get picky and refuse to eat foods that are too far below their level. Let's look at diet first.
Diet
There are six basic types of food: bread, cheese, fish, fruit, fungus, and meat. In addition, some pets will also eat raw fish and raw meat (although read the note below -- "raw" doesn't seem to mean what we normally think it means here). The game won't tell you directly what type of food each item is, although generally it's pretty easy to figure out: Bear Meat is meat, Slitherskin Mackerel is fish and so forth. For some more complex foods, like Jungle Stew, you may need to experiment -- just try to feed it to your pet and see if he eats it! There is no penalty for trying to feed your pet the wrong food.
You can check to see what kinds of foods your pet will eat by looking at the Pet Details panel and hovering over the green happy face on the upper left. (Note that this icon is always green -- it is only there to show what your pet will eat, not to show how happy your pet is!) Or you can use the hunter spell Beast Lore on your pet and then hover your mouse over the pet: the diet will display on the tooltip that pops up. Alternatively, since a pet's diet is determined by his family -- all wolves have the same diet, all sporebats have the same diet, and so on -- you can check this handy comparison table to see which families eat what.
Food Level
Even if you have the right kind of food, your pet may refuse to eat it if the food is too low level. The level of the food also affects how much happiness your pet gains. (The happiness chart below has more details on that.) So in general, it's a good idea to use food that is close to or above the level of your pet.
But how do you know what level a food is? Well the game doesn't tell you that directly, but it will tell you what level the food requires to use. This requirement doesn't apply to pets -- pets can eat foods above their level, although they don't get any extra benefit from them. But generally speaking, the required level for a food is 10 levels less than the food's actual level -- so you can assume that a Smoked Talbuk Venison with a required level of 55 has an actual level of 65.
At very low levels this isn't quite exact, but for higher level foods it holds true quite well. If you want to know the levels of your food exactly, there are a number of UI addons that display that information, or you can check a WoW database site like Thottbot.
The Feed Pet Effect
Okay, so you understand that feeding your pet is important and you know how and what to feed your pet. But what exactly does Feed Pet actually do?
When you feed your pet, it gains the Feed Pet Effect. This is a periodic buff that lasts for 20 seconds and ticks every 2 seconds for a total of 10 ticks. Every tick, your pet will gain some amount of happiness -- the amount depends on the level of the food compared to your pet's level.
(We will eventually have a full article on happiness, but in the meantime here is a quick reference table for pet food level and happiness.)
| Food Item Level vs. Pet Level |
Food Required Level vs. Pet Level |
Happiness per Tick |
| 9 below | 19 below | 35 |
| 10-19 below | 20-29 below | 17 |
| 20-29 below | 30-39 below | 8 |
| 30+ below | 40+ below | Pet will not eat. |
While your pet has the Feed Pet effect, he will display a little buff icon under his portrait when he is selected. In addition, you can monitor the effect and exactly how much happiness your pet is getting with a particular food by watching the the output in the Combat tab of your chat bar. (If you want to move these to another tab, or if you have turned them off at some point, look for the category called "Your Periodic Buffs" under "Periodic Effects". If you want to see when Feed Pet fades from you, you will also need to watch "Auras wearing off You" under "Spell Messages (con't)". )
Once you've started feeding your pet you'll need to wait for the Feed Pet effect to wear off before you feed him again. A second application of Feed Pet will over-write the first, so you can't stack them to get more benefit faster. In general, your best bet is to sit and wait patiently while your pet finishes his meal. If your pet is at or close to his maximum happiness, you may see the amount of happiness per tick taper off, and the Feed Pet effect may end early. That's expected: it just means that your pet is full up of happiness and doesn't have room for any more. Feeding him when he is completely full will just waste food.
If your pet takes damage the Feed Pet effect will break and you will not get any more happiness from that piece of food. You also can't start feeding your pet while you are in combat. But if you start feeding before you enter combat, the effect will only break if your pet takes damage. So in some situations you can set your pet to passive, feed him real quick, and then let him eat while you dive into combat and protect him from enemies.
If you dismiss your pet while it is eating (either explictly with Dismiss Pet or automatically by getting out of range or mounting up), the Feed Pet Effect will stop until you re-summon your pet. But -- and this is important -- the 20 seconds for the spell will continue to run even while your pet is dismissed. So if you accidentally mount up right after feeding your pet, go ahead and dismount immediately -- you may have missed a tick or two of happiness, but you can still get the rest, and if you wait the spell will run out and you won't get any more happiness from this feeding.
And that's the basics of feeding your pet! Simple enough! Now let's look at a couple of frequently-asked questions.
Feeding FAQ
Does my pet get buffs from food? Does my pet get health from eating?
Unfortunately, no -- pets don't benefit from food buffs and they don't gain health from eating like players do. All they get is happiness.
However, there are a couple of special "pet snacks" that can buff your pet: Sporeling Snacks and Kibler's Bits. Sporeling Snacks will buff your pet's Stamina and Spirit, and Kibler's Bits will buff your pet's Strength and Spirit.
Oddly, however, these items aren't really pet foods -- you use these items yourself, you do not feed them to your pet with the Feed Pet skill. So far as we know, no pets will eat either Sporeling Snacks or Kibler's Bits as a food so you do not need to worry about accidental feeding. But most hunters try feeding these snacks first and are confused when it doesn't work
What's the best diet?
From a purely functional viewpoint, it doesn't matter whether your pet eats fungus or meat -- all food works the same. So a "good" diet is largely a matter of convenience. What's most convenient? Depends on your playstyle!
On one hand, you could look specifically for a pet that eats a wide variety of foods. Bears and boars both eat everything (except "raw fish" and "raw meat", but as we discuss below, that isn't a huge loss). Pets like this can snarf up any odds and ends you happen to come across and are especially accomodating with cooking leftovers. Plus, if you do run out of food you are almost guarenteed to find something for them at a nearby town. A pickier pet might mean a longer trip to restock.
Alternatively, you might look for a pet with a more limited diet, but one that is readily available to you. For example, if you spend a lot of time with friendly mages you might want a pet that can eat conjured bread, like a crab or a wind serpent. Or if you are working on your fishing skill, a pet who eats fish is handy to have around! Finally, meat tends to be fairly available most of the time -- it drops off of many creatures in the wild, and Azeroth is well-supplied with butcher shops.
Fruit and fungus are often considered the least convenient diets because they can be hard to find. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't tame a bat or a gorilla, but if you do you might also want to spend a little time tracking down some good fruit shops.
You can compare diet across all pet families with this handy diet comparison table.
What counts as "Raw Fish" and "Raw Meat"?
When World of Warcraft began, there were only six types of foods: bread, cheese, fish, fruit, fungus, and meat. But around the time of the Burning Crusade expansion, some pets started to display two new diet options: "Raw Fish" or "Raw Meat".
Now a pet that eats meat will also eat uncooked meat, and a pet that eats fish will also eat uncooked fish, so it was somewhat surprising to see these "raw" diets appear. But some simple testing showed that pets who eat meat or fish but not "raw meat" or "raw fish" continued to eat uncooked meat and fish. So at first we assumed that the raw diets were identical to the regular diets -- that "raw meat" really just meant the same as meat, for example.
Recently, however, this theory was proven wrong when a hunter named Jayla let us know that ravagers and serpents (both of which will eat raw meat) will eat Partially Digested Meat when other meat-eating pets like wolves and owls will not. This seems to indicate that there is a difference between meat and raw meat diets. Unfortunately, we have no idea how to tell what items count as "raw meat", nor do we have a comprehensive list of "raw" items.
On the other hand, since we haven't yet discovered any commonly-available "raw" meat or fish products, it seems perfectly safe to go on thinking of raw diets as equivalent to their non-raw counterparts for now.