How Much Do You Have to Feed Your Pet in Vanilla

Feed Pet
Feed Pet 10 yd range n/a cooldown Instant cast Feed your pet the selected item. Feeding your pet increases happiness. Using food close to the pet's level will have a better result.
Usable by
Class	Hunter
Properties
Type	Utility
School	Physical
Cooldown	n/a
Related buff
Feed Pet Effect Increases happiness. Duration: 20 seconds

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 shows the food types the pet will consume.

To feed a pet a food item:

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.

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

Do not simply left-click the food you wish to feed your pet. This will either do nothing, or if the food is edible, you will begin eating it instead.

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. This buff increases the pet's happiness each tick. Wait for the "Feed Pet Effect" buff on your pet to disappear or watch the Combat Log for "Feed Pet Effect fades". If the pet takes damage, this buff will be removed, limiting the total happiness gained.

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. (It is not possible to see the pet's exact happiness points.)

Pets do not gain much happiness being fed food below their level. If the food is too low, they will refuse to eat it.

Pets will eat food somewhat above their level, but gain no extra benefit. Some foods may be too high level for a lower level pet.

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 food from every major food category. With the introduction of 'raw fish' and 'raw meat', no pet eats every kind of food. See the hunter pets page for a table with a detailed listing of what pet eats what food.

Feeding tips

Monitor the Combat Log of your chat box to see how much happiness your pet gets from the food. If the level of the food is 35-25 levels lower then the pet it gains 8 Happiness per tick, If the level of the food is level 25-15 it gains 17 happiness, if the level of the food is 15 levels lower or higher it gains 35 happiness.

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.

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.

You can take a pet that eats meat and hunt mobs that drop meat. These pets are the easiest to maintain.

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.

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.

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.

Patch changes

As of Patch 3.2.2, the hunter will now visibly throw its pet a given food item when feeding. This does not apply to pure buff items such as Sporeling Snacks or Kibler's Bits. Only food items.

Feeding UIs

http://www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php?addid=163

External links

Petopia the basics of feeding your pet

Petopia pet diets chart (up-to-date data)

Thottbot chart with pet diets (out-of-date data)

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