Being a "good" Tamer is not just about skill numbers. Someone with GM in Taming and Animal Lore is not neccessarily better than a person with lower skills. I have seen a good number of "Glorious Lord XY, GM Tamer" who didn't have a clue what they were doing. On the other hand, I was able to handle difficult situations and large pets with my adept level tamer rather well , because I knew what I was doing and what to expect. If you take the time to learn your profession properly, you will save yourself a lot of frustration and dead pets lost to your own incompetence.

Commanding and feeding

Use Animal Lore on your pet to find out what it likes to eat, if you don't know already. Loyalty declines over time and needs to be brought back to maximum level by feeding your pet. Failed commands and leaving your pet's line of sight cause loyalty to decline more rapidly. One piece of food will be sufficient in most cases to make your pet "wonderfully happy".

Travelling with pets

• Felucca Dungeons and Lost Lands
  Publish 16 included a rule change for all dungeons and all of the Lost Lands (T2A) - if you die there, you are automatically teleported to a city of your choice. Your pets will accompany you, regardless if bonded or not. You cannot return to any of these areas for 20 minutes after you die, except if you were killed by the champion monster of a dynamic spawn. If this happens, you are allowed to return immediately.
• Crossing Server Boundaries
  Sometimes crossing a server boundary can be tricky, because your pets tend to get "stuck" on them. The easiest method to get them across is to mark a rune on the other side and recall with your bonded pets, or gate your unbonded pet from the side it's stuck on. If you can't cast Gate Travel yet or don't have a blank rune on you, the solution is to start running with your pet following you from about half a screen away, in a 90 degree angle to the server boundary and keep going until you crossed it. This might take some practice, but you will soon get the hang of it.
• Gate Travel
  With publish 16 a profound change was made to Gate Travel with pets: they will no longer walk into a gate without their owner. Now the owner has to step through first and sometimes there is a small delay before the pets arrive after you. Unfortunately, gating is still a somewhat risky in regards to bugged gates, but the major nuisance of other people gating away a tamer's pets has been removed. Bonded pets have two tremendous advantages in being able to recall with you.
• Getting pets onto boats
  There are two ways to accomplish this, only one if you have no Magery. Neither pets nor NPC's will follow you onto your boat unless the gangplank and shore are perfectly aligned in height, and the plank must touch the shore. They do not step over open water. Go aboard your boat and open the plank and tell the pet to follow you. The easiest way is to use docks. Unfortunately docks are often crowded which can be a problem with dragons. If you have the skill to gate, mark a rune on the shore and tell your pet to "stay". Then go aboard your boat and gate on the newly marked rune. Walk out the Gate, tell the beast to "follow" and step right back through. Again, bonded pets have the advantage of being able to recall with you. Getting a pet off the boat is simple, they don't seem to mind jumping onto the shore. If you have multiple pets, you might have to return to the boat for each one and walk off again.

Stuck pets

One trick that always works to get a pet unstuck is once again the Gate spell. Mark a rune a few steps away from your "stuck" companion, step aside, cast Gate on the rune and tell your pet to follow you. Then step into the gate and your pet will appear next to you. For magical pets no special trick is required - they can help themselves. Just tell them to "come" instead of commanding them to follow you, and they will teleport from their inconvenient position. This may take a few attempts and only works if your pet can "hear" you. If your pet can't hear your commands because it is stuck in a place below or above your z-axis position, you will need the help of a Game Master to retrieve it. (Unless it can fly and takes off from it's position on it's own after a little while or it is bonded and can recall with you.)

Two-part names for pets

Don't delete the spaces, but work around them. For example: 'a timber wolf'. Position the cursor just to the right of 'a', backspace, type, repeat. This way you get two-word names with a space between words. However, pets will not respond if you use this kind of name. Your only possibility will be using "all" commands, which can be tricky if you have more than one pet with you, or commanding via the context menu. You can also claim pets with two-part names from the stable only by using the "claim list" command.

Taming aggressive creatures

The most important fact here is, you can not tame a creature that is receiving damage of any kind and that can not pathfind to you. Now what to do? Stay out of the creature's melee range, paralyze it. To keep it from attacking after being tamed, tell the pet "[petname] stop". If you are out for "bigger game" like dragons, drakes, white wyrms or nightmares, you might want to take an experienced Tamer with you to show you the ropes. If you have just the minimum skill to tame one of the "big ones", there is a good chance you will spend an hour or longer trying to persuade the beast to become your new friend. Most high level creatures do not take kindly to being tamed. "You seem to anger the beast" is most likely the result you will see quite often before you can actually start a (not necessarily successful) taming attempt. Keep trying, and eventually you will succeed. If not for the long hours of getting to this level of taming, here your "tame/last target" macro will come in very, very handy.

Pet flagging

Just like your character, your pet is subject to the flagging system of the game. It is recommended to be guilded if you are a Tamer, mainly because it gives you more feedback on what your pet is doing. There is actually no difference in how the pets act when you are in a guild or aren't. However, when you are in a guild there is a third color to give you more information on the status changes.

• Criminal - this flag outweighs all others, and you need to be careful when dealing with gray pets, since you won't know what status they are actually in.
• Normal - regular blue NPC (normally attacked by aggressive creatures). If the pet kills anything, you will not gain fame or karma from the kill, if it kills a person, you won't be given a murder count.
• Aggressive - green, which you will only see if you are guilded (if you're not guilded, you will just see blue). This color comes up with any "Guard", "Attack", or "Kill" command, and sets the controller flag, so if it kills anyone, you can get a murder count. Also if it is in this condition and it attacks something within a guard zone, and the guards are called, you will be killed right beside your pet. You will only get fame and karma from your kills if you are set as the controller of your pet. If you release a pet that flags green, you are fully responsible for it's actions until the controller flag wears off - and you cannot command a released pet anymore!

Important note: while you can tell your pet to attack an enemy guildmember (orange) without penalty, both you and your pet will go grey if you command it to attack your enemy's pet, even tho it appears orange to you.

Equipment and preparation

Often people ask me "what do you carry with you when you are out hunting with your pets?". Besides the usual stock of reagents I always carry the following:

• A few pieces of the appropriate kind of food for the pet(s) I have with me (the amount depending on your control level) is always important. You don't want to search for it when you urgently need it. I also always carry a few cooked fish steaks to keep myself well fed.
• At least one blank rune for "emergency marks" in case a pet gets stuck. I mark my "blank" runes in a random spot and label them "dummy" so I can store them in my runebook and not lose them when I happen to die. I am not prepared to break this habit just yet, even with the special abilities of bonded pets.
• Newbified scissors, because all my characters use the Veterinary skill and I don't want to keep track of one of my most important tools.
• My newbie dagger, to carve meat and hides or shear sheep as needed.
• A set of runebooks with runes to my most frequently visited locations (home, bank, stable, favorite hunting areas).
• About 200-300 bandages.

As far as preparation goes, I have a few words of advice as well. And since we all know how newly implemented features work (or rather don't work), even with bonded pets i'm not quite willing to give up on these precautions yet:

• Investing time into acquiring any level of the Sacrifice virtue, which allows you to resurrect yourself anywhere between one and three times per week depending on your level, is definitely a good idea for anyone who values their pets and likes to adventure in Trammel, Ilshenar or any areas in Felucca, except the dungeons and Lost Lands.
• Make sure your runebooks is fully charged with recall scrolls at all times. This is incredibly convenient if you happen to die, since runebooks are blessed and will stay with you instead of on your corpse. No matter where you are resurrected, you will be able to be re-equipped in almost no time.
• Keep an "emergency pack" in your bank box at all times, and if you use it, restock it immediately. Your inventory should be a small amount of each reagent (about 10-20 each), some bandages, a few pieces of pet food and a few Gate scrolls. The purpose of this emergency pack is also to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible after a death and to allow you to try to save your pets from dieing or going wild.