Pets
~~~~
Written mostly by Jonathan Ellis for NetHack 3.2.3
"Training pets" section adapted from "pets" as collected by Boudewijn 
Wayers for Nethack 3.1.3

Normally, your pet will follow you around. It will attack monsters that 
threaten you, and has a (rather annoying, especially if you are hungry)
tendency to eat their corpses before you get the chance to. Your pet, however, 
will *never* eat a poisonous corpse, or one which would make you hallucinate, 
or one which is too old or acidic. The only corpses your pet will eat which 
are not entirely safe for the player are those of bats, which your pet can eat 
with impunity but you will be stunned for a few turns if you try. (And, of 
course, tripe rations, which your pet will love but will make you sick.) 

If your pet gets too hungry, it will become confused and attack anything it 
sees, including you. (Note: even then, you cannot kill your pet with impunity: see below.)

If you leave a pet alone on a level (say, if one of you gets level-teleported 
or falls through a trapdoor, or you simply leave it behind when you use the 
stairs) and it doesn't starve to death, it may go feral - in which case it may 
be peaceful or hostile when you meet it again, but is no longer your pet.

If you kill your pet, on purpose or by accident (say, you zap a magic missile 
at a monster, it rebounds off the wall behind the monster, whizzes past you 
and hits your pet who was behind you) you will suffer a large alignment 
penalty and make your god angry with you: but if it has gone feral it is no 
longer considered your pet when you kill it. If your pet dies but is not 
killed directly by you - in other words, if it dies of starvation, a trap, or
is killed by a monster, there is no penalty.

Taming monsters to make pets
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can tame any little dog, dog, large dog, kitten, housecat or large cat by 
throwing an item of food at it: they will eat pancakes, eggs and small edible 
corpses (i.e. non-poisonous, non-hallucinogenous, non-acidic, and not too 
old), but their favourite food is tripe rations. The creature will catch and 
eat the food, and become your pet. You can tame other monsters - provided you 
are powerful enough and they are weak enough - by reading a scroll of taming
or casting a spell of charm monster: this will attempt to tame all monsters in
adjacent squares to the player. If you are confused, you have a much lower 
chance of success, but can tame anything up to five squares away. Some
monsters can never be tamed. Stepping on a magic trap without magic resistance
carries a small chance of casting a taming spell: this method is, however, 
necessarily hit-and-miss.

Leashes
~~~~~~~

You may put your pet on a leash by "a"pplying the leash to it when it is next 
to you. Beware of applying a cursed leash, as it will get tighter and 
eventually choke your pet to death. A leashed pet will follow its owner
more closely than a pet which is not on a leash: and it will teleport with the
player if the player teleports or level-teleports. (Be careful on levels with 
water or lava, because your pet will follow you into the water and drown - 
this is considered to be your fault and you suffer the alignment penalty, and 
it is also your fault if you choke it with a cursed leash.) If you step on a 
concealed trapdoor and would normally fall through to another level but your 
pet is on a leash and not standing next to you, it will hold you back and 
prevent you from falling in. If your leashed pet is next to you, it will
fall through the trapdoor with you instead.

Robbing shops with your pets
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can also train your pets to rob shops, which is one way of cheating the
shopkeeper without angering him or summoning the Keystone Kops (or getting 
an alignment penalty if lawful.) When in a shop, stand in the doorway but 
let your dog or cat enter. Eventually, he will pick up something (unless 
everything is cursed, of course). A while later, he will drop it. Once in a 
while, your dog will drop the thing exactly before you (the first spot INSIDE 
the shop, next to the door). Anything that lies here is free for you to take.

Of course, the chance that your dog drops his stuff exactly there is
not very big. What you should do is toss it some food: when you do this,
your dog will have "learned" that it gets fed when it drops something next
to you. Basically, whenever you throw something at your pet, it gets more 
tame: and the more tame it is, the more likely it is to pick up something 
and drop it next to you (and every time it does that it gets a little 
less tame). Tripe rations have the biggest effect, but anything that your 
pet will eat is good.

Another minor point is that you don't need to actually throw the tripe
ration at the pet to make it "tamer". Anytime the pet eats something
which you once carried (the game stores it's previous inventory letter
to indicate if you've held it), it gets tamer. So, if you walk into a 
general store which contains tripe rations, but you have no money, just 
close the door on your pet, pick up all the tripe then drop it, then let 
your pet in. It will eat the tripe, get tamer (since you once held the 
tripe), and then pick up stuff in the store and drop it by you.

To improve this even more, drop something cursed somewhere in the shop,
and pile all the stuff in the shop that you don't want on top of the
cursed thing. That way your pet won't waste time bringing you things
you don't want, as your pet does not like moving on top of cursed items and will not pick up anything from a square with a cursed item on it.
