I've been searching for info about pet loyalty and in general it seems to be spread all over the net, so I've desided to make this post on pet loyalty with the info I've been able to gather. I hope it will be useful, and if you have anything to add or correct, please fell free to do so.

What is pet loyalty:
Pet loyalty is a measure of how close a bond your Hunter has with its pet. It is measured in six levels: Rebellious, Unruly, Submissive, Dependable, Faithful and Best Friend (which takes the longest to obtain).
For each level of loyalty gained the pet will gain training points. Any other effects of pet loyalty is unknown. But if both your pets loyalty and happinesss is at its lowest your pet will leave you.

What is pet happiness:
Pet happiness is a measure of how happy your pet is... It is measured in three levels: Unhappy, Content, and Happy.
If your pet is Unhappy it will only do 75% of possible damage and it will loose loyalty, if it is content it will do 100% and not change loyalty, and if it is Happy it will do 125% damage and gain loyalty.
In order to increase happiness you must feed your pet. You can see which kinds of foods it likes through the character screen, on the Pet tab.
You can also see the state of the pets happiness next to it's portrait in the game field (just below your own). The small smiley-icon shows it.

What are training points:
Training points are like skillpoints, only for pets. Just as you can level skills on your hunter, you can level skills on your pet, only instead of learning by doing, you pay with training points.
Most pet skills come in several ranks, each more powerful than the last. Pets don't need to learn each rank, you can bypass some if you'd like.
As you learn the skills, the higher ranks get cheaper, or in other words, you end up spending the same amount of training points whether you buy each and every rank of a skill as you would if you bought the highest possible rank to start with. One thing to keep in mind when training your pet is that while it can learn many different passive skills (armor, stamina, resistances) it has a maximum of four active skills (bite, claw, rake).
If you want to change what you've taught your pet, you can unlearn all the training points you've spent at a pet trainer (just like you can unlearn the talent points you've spent on your hunter at your trainer) for an increasing fee.
You can respec your hunter without respeccing your pet, and you can respec your pet without respeccing your hunter.

The newly tamed pet:
Your pet may have negative training points if it knew a skill from before you tamed it, corresponding to the cost of learning that skill.
The higher level your pet is, the more training points it will get from gaining loyalty. If you tame a lower level pet it will get less points from loyalty but make up for it by getting the rest from levelling. So at level 60, with loyalty level 6 and nothing learned, your pet will always have 300 training points, regardless of when you aquired it.

Raising loyalty level:
Your pet will gain loyalty only if it is happy. It seems to come more quickly for lower level players than for higher levels.
How to get through the loyalty levels the fastest is a topic that seems to be much discussed. Most agree that from loyalty level 1 to loyalty level 2 you need to go hunting with it, for mobs that will give you xp (which are also the only mobs that will give your pet xp). From then on some say that you need to keep xp'ing, some say you should still go hunting, but taking it to the battlegrounds is good enough, and some say that you just need to keep it happy and spend time with it.
Getting your pet killed will seriously decrease its happiness and thus will slow down the loyalty levelling process.

A bit of math:
TrainingPoints = PetLevel * (LoyaltyLevel - 1)
A rule of thumb I found is that 5 bars of unrested and unquested xp = 1 pet level (when the pet is 1 level below you).
Pets of the same loyalty and level will have the same training points regardless of whether they were tamed at a low or high level.

Resources:
http://tkasomething.com/petskills.php
http://www.goodintentionsguild.info/hunters.html
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/

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Q u o t e:


Raising loyalty level:
Your pet will gain loyalty only if it is happy. It seems to come more quickly for lower level players than for higher levels.
How to get through the loyalty levels the fastest is a topic that seems to be much discussed. Most agree that from loyalty level 1 to loyalty level 2 you need to go hunting with it, for mobs that will give you xp (which are also the only mobs that will give your pet xp). From then on some say that you need to keep xp'ing, some say you should still go hunting, but taking it to the battlegrounds is good enough, and some say that you just need to keep it happy and spend time with it.
Getting your pet killed will seriously decrease its happiness and thus will slow down the loyalty levelling process.

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from my own experience, if you go grind with your pet, or use it when you raid while keeping it happy (feeding it alot) will raise your loyality lvl pretty fast.
altho keep in mind that if you pet is already happy he wont get the same amount of happiness from food. so it seems there is some kind of max happiness you need to keep your pet on to gain loyality.

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Q u o t e:


from my own experience, if you go grind with your pet, or use it when you raid while keeping it happy (feeding it alot) will raise your loyality lvl pretty fast.
altho keep in mind that if you pet is already happy he wont get the same amount of happiness from food. so it seems there is some kind of max happiness you need to keep your pet on to gain loyality.

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Sometimes it seems like happy is measured total numbr where the happyness degrades over time.

So look at it as a healthbar that has a permanent DoT. Then they made it so that if the happyness is greater than 66.6 % then the pet is happy. between 33 and 66 its content and below 33 its unhappy.

Happyness gained from food depends on the level of the food. Low level food will give "pet doesnt like that food" and high level food will give a higher number of happyness points per tick.

So even when the pet is allready happy it can be fed. Just view the happyness bar at 70% and increasing it to 90%. As we saw earlier the happyness goes from happy to content at 66 and lower. And 70 is greater than 66 so it may seem as if the pet doesnt need food (although its nearly unhappy).

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Q u o t e:


Sometimes it seems like happy is measured total numbr where the happyness degrades over time.

So look at it as a healthbar that has a permanent DoT. Then they made it so that if the happyness is greater than 66.6 % then the pet is happy. between 33 and 66 its content and below 33 its unhappy.

Happyness gained from food depends on the level of the food. Low level food will give "pet doesnt like that food" and high level food will give a higher number of happyness points per tick.

So even when the pet is allready happy it can be fed. Just view the happyness bar at 70% and increasing it to 90%. As we saw earlier the happyness goes from happy to content at 66 and lower. And 70 is greater than 66 so it may seem as if the pet doesnt need food (although its nearly unhappy).

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well as it seems to be, you need to keep you pets happiness over a sertain % for a sertain amount of time to gain a rank up

I was sure the tooltip for the 'middle' happiness says the pet is gaining loyalty, you say it's not changing.

there is loyalty and happyness, 2 separate things.
happyness allways decreases at some rate, but when the pet is either content or happy it will gain loyalty.

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Q u o t e:
Raising loyalty level:
Most agree that from loyalty level 1 to loyalty level 2 you need to go hunting with it, for mobs that will give you xp (which are also the only mobs that will give your pet xp). From then on some say that you need to keep xp'ing, some say you should still go hunting, but taking it to the battlegrounds is good enough, and some say that you just need to keep it happy and spend time with it.

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Seems to be correct, had my pet out for several hours without fighting at loyalty rank1 waiting for it to get rank2 but it didn't increase. After 5 hours raiding it didn't increase either.
Once I soloed with it for less then an hour I got rank2.
After that he continued to get higher ranks from just standing with me in Shatt.

This one should be sticky really. Good info :)

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Q u o t e:
After 5 hours raiding it didn't increase either.

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Probably because your pet got killed a couple of times? It took some damage? That might add to slowing the loyalty levelrate.

This one deserves a sticky idd but you should certainly add it to the hunterwiki

Nope, it only died once while raiding.

I find it weird that nobody said this before: Sticky maybe?
This is really helpful for starting hunters I think.

From having far too many new pets, my experience on gaining loyalty is the following:

You tame the pet, it starts at Loyalty 1. Once the pet has gained enough XP (even if it's already at 70, the XP counts), it can gain another loyalty level. Obviously, the pet has to be happy for this to occur.

You can sit around for as long as you like with a new pet and keep feeding it, it won't gain any loyalty levels. It has to earn XP.

Noted observations of pets, when I'm L70:
- a L69 pet gained loyalty levels at 25% XP, 50% XP, 75% XP, and just after dinging L70
- a L30 pet gained loyalty levels roughly every 2.5 levels.

I found out that if you are trying to max your pet's loyalty lvl, you need to have your pet attacking mobs/players(PvP) frequently. If you do not let your pet attack it will not gain loyalty.

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Q u o t e:
I found out that if you are trying to max your pet's loyalty lvl, you need to have your pet attacking mobs/players(PvP) frequently. If you do not let your pet attack it will not gain loyalty.

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Not entirely true.. I've had pets 'ding' a level of loyalty while idling in Orgrimmar. Actively using your pet seems to increase the rate of loyalty-gain by a large ammount though.

for a moment i thought crezax was back :(

Pet leveling loyalty:

according to the blog of the author of petopia; a pet gets loyalty after a fixed amount of time + 5% of the rep YOU would require to gain 1 level. So thats why low level hunters with pets get loyalty so much faster then high lvl hunters with low lvl pets.

http://www.maniasarcania.com/2007/09/10/loyalty-gain-time-and-experience/

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Q u o t e:
I found out that if you are trying to max your pet's loyalty lvl, you need to have your pet attacking mobs/players(PvP) frequently. If you do not let your pet attack it will not gain loyalty.

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I have had several low-level pets, that I have levelled since I hit 70, most recently a level 23 pet. And until the pet was at least 70, I didn't bother to use it at all, I just kept it on passive beside me. And these pets gained loyalty without ever attacking a mob.

There are a lot of myths and rumors about pet loyalty, but after 3 years as a hunter, this is what I find comes closest to the truth .... http://www.maniasarcania.com/2007/09/10/loyalty-gain-time-and-experience/

edit: beaten by a few minutes : )

A quick question on the training points;

I see the cost of things like greater stamina & natural armor jumps at an exponential rate.
Why would I spend 100 points for 21 stamina when I could spend 25 for 10? It just doesn't seem efficient.

Would you suggest skipping those two skills at 70 and simply stacking spell resists?

And thanks for the thread, most helpful [:

A few have mentioned raiding with your pet in order to increase loyalty; in my experience this doesn't work. Party by all means, and ofc solo, but don't join a raid.

Raiding with your pet will (just about) increase the loyalty but at a much reduced rate. Joining a party increases it more than solo, which is still far more than via raiding.

I mean PvE raiding - I have almost no PvP experience, so can't comment on that.

Fastest way I've found to increase a new pet's loyalty level is to do some heroics, closely followed by the mine-based netherwing dailys, as they're intense.