This is a 3.0 feat, trying to port it over, balanced and tweaked for PF. Critiques and thoughts welcome.
Wild Cohort [General]
You have a special bond with a wild animal, and it is willing to travel and adventure with you.
Prerequisite: 5th Level, Animal Affinity
Benefit: You gain an animal cohort. The animal cohort is generally friendly to you and is willing to follow you and adventure with you. If given proper training, the animal cohort will willingly serve as your mount, guardian, and companion.
You can choose from a badger, bird (eagle, hawk, owl, etc), boar, camel, dog, horse, pony, shark, snake (constrictor or viper), or wolf from the druid’s animal companion list. You may choose another animal you feel is more appropriate to your character, pending your GM’s approval.
Treat your effective druid level as 4 lower than your character level. For example, once you reach 7th level, you would calculate the strength of your animal cohort as a 3rd level druid.
You can use the Handle Animal skill on your animal cohort to ‘handle’ it as a free action rather than as a move action, and you ‘push’ it as a standard action rather than a full-round action. You gain a +2 bonus on all Handle Animal checks made with your animal cohort. Additionally, if the animal cohort is trained in riding or combat training you gain a +2 bonus on Ride checks with your animal cohort.
You can only ever have one wild cohort at any given time.
Special: Druids, rangers or any other class which has selected an animal companion or mount, who take the wild cohort feat gain an animal cohort in addition to their animal companion or mount. Although the two abilities are similar, they follow different sets of rules and must be tracked separately.
IMOHO I think it's too much for a feat. It could work in some campaigns, but only when there are very few players. There exist Archetypes for gaining multiple animal companions I would suggest using existing material to cover a character with multiple animals.
@ Altus - I thought so as well, which is why I added Animal Affinity as a prereq - also adds the flavor of 'this guy is already naturally better with animals'.
This is designed more for the player who wants a mount or animal companion - but their class doesn't really help them. The mounted fighter, the priviledged wizard, etc.
Do you feel it would be better to disallow it for a character that already receives an animal companion/mount?
No, if you're making this, allow it for the AC classes too. A druid can have a pet tiger and also a strong mount.
Maybe it's an idea though, to restrict this to mount-only animals? Maybe based on the Cavalier list?
Also, it needs a note saying whether you can or can't use Boon Companion to boost this wild cohort. Probably not, but it deserves an explicit note.
This was covered in the 3.5 DMG if you're looking for balance, under the heading unusual cohorts (page199). The mechanic was that a character could attract a creature to use as their cohort under the Leadership feat. The Pathfinder mod would be to limit the cohort to a CR equal to the character level less 2, rather than ECL -2.
Your feat thus duplicates the Leadership feat, but is available at a lower level. It provides additional benefits (ie the Handle Animal checks, etc.) but perhaps that is offset by not getting the followers that Leadership would get.
So all in all, it seems good, but perhaps a level 7 pre-req might be more inline with other canon feats.
@ Qralloq - I think that makes balance sense, raising it to 7th level.
@ Ascalaphus - why not let it be compatible with Boon Companion? If someone wishes to use a feat, why not let them? Also, if restricting the list to mounts only - should the feat exclude classes who already receive mounts?
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