Pet abilities

A hunter pet can have different abilities, depending on its pet specialization. Each specialization is generally focused around a specific role. Cunning has high utility and is good in PvP. Ferocity is focused on DPS and is good in dungeons and raids. Tenacity is focused on pet survival and threat generation; good for soloing.

Each pet family—or beast type—has a special ability; some have a bonus ability. Some pet families are only usable by Beast Mastery hunters and have an exotic ability.

Damaging pet abilities scale with the pet's melee attack power or bonus spell damage. Physical abilities generally gain bonus damage equal to 7% of the pet's melee attack power, while spell abilities generally gain bonus damage equal to 1/3 of the pet's bonus spell damage. See the attack power coefficient article for further details.

Basic attacks
These abilities are also known as focus dumps because they are often used to expend excess focus while more efficient or useful abilities are on cooldown. Each pet has one. The differences between these are cosmetic; they are effectively the same.

Patch changes
Originally, there were 6 basic pet abilities: Bite, Claw, Cower, Growl, Dash and Dive.
 * v1.8.0 added eight more
 * v1.9.0 added 3 more.
 * v2.1.0 added 2 more.
 * v3.0.2 removed all previous skills and replaced it with a pet talent system.
 * v5.0.4 removed pet talent system and replaced it with pet specialization system.
 * v7.0.3 removed pet raid buffs.