Help with catching and training pets

[MK138]

So my group and I are all a bit new to the game.(a few of us have some minor D&D experiences) We don't yet have one solid GM, as we all kinda trade the role so everyone can experience the game. Currently we are in discussion over how to acquire pets. Now I'm not talking about animal companions, just things you can catch in the wild using handle animal. Are there any good guides/threads out there for this process, as this seems to be a very big grey area in the game. We do have a druid in the group, but I'm really wanting to know how this can be done with just handle animal.

[Xexyz]

I recommend Iron Bands of Binding for the catching part.

[MK138]

OK, to better specify a question, the only thing i see for handle animal is in the CR.

Rear a Wild Animal: To rear an animal means to raise a wild creature from infancy so that it becomes domesticated. A handler can rear as many as three creatures of the same kind at once.

A successfully domesticated animal can be taught tricks at the same time it's being raised, or it can be taught as a domesticated animal later.

But if any of our players manage to capture a animal, how do you go about domesticating what I guess would be considered a adult animal. For example lets say, our party encounters a Dire wolf, and they manage to take the animal to negative hit points, they then use stabilize on it to prevent it from dieing. At which point it could be moved into a cage. From here would it just be a matter of handle animal DC's (starting with DC 15+HD) to tame the animal, and then train? Or is this totally off base?

[dave.gillam]

thats it

unless you have a pokeball handy

[MK138]

now is there a way these pets could advance? would their effective HD be converted to lvl for the sake of advancement, or would this become to much like a animal companion?

[Odraude]

There isn't really a way to advance a pet, since they can't really take class levels without being awakened. What I like to do as GM is allow people that take Leadership to instead turn their pet into an animal companion like the ranger's, their effective druid level being Character Level -4. It works pretty well and players enjoy it.

[Booksy]

Capturing an animal has nothing to do with 'handling' it. You're either in Survival or appropriate Knowledge concerning its capture. The idea is that you've reared a wild animal from infancy - so acquiring it was really a matter of:

1) finding a nest/litter of younglings
2) distracting/killing parent animals
3) putting younglings/eggs in a bag
4) going home and conducting handle animal checks for training

For normally domestic animals buy them, or assume some local has had an unwanted birth, you've been given the youngling and fed/raised/trained it yourself. Deduct the cost of food, etc from the PC's stash.