Feed Pet

Feed Pet is a level 5 hunter ability that allows hunters to heal their pets for 50% of their health while out of combat.

Functionality
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.
 * or


 * 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.

Limitations
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 which pet eats what food.

Feeding tips
Cooked 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.

Healing from Feed Pet doesn't scale with the food's level. Low-level cooked fish is amazingly cheap at fishing-related vendors (a full stack of Longjaw Mud Snapper is less than 1 silver), and low-level raw fish can be caught with very low fishing skill.

The easiest pets to feed from mob drops are those that eat raw meat.

Many pets can eat food raw that the hunter can't.

Pets that eat bread can eat food conjured by mages.

Happiness
Before Patch 4.1, feeding your pet did not heal it. Instead, feeding increased your pet's happiness and kept it in a good mood. The happier a pet was, the more damage it dealt:


 * Happy: 125% damage
 * Content: 100% damage
 * Unhappy: 75% damage

However when the glyph system was added, the Glyph of Mending, which at the time increased happiness level, made feeding a pet not as important. In Cataclysm the happiness levels were removed, and the pet now stays in happy mood. Feeding now just heals the pet rather than making it happier.