One of my players is a Ranger. When building a character, she had a ton of extra money, and decided she wanted a German Shepherd. After a ton of research and looking through a 3rd party book on Pathfinder Dog species, found out it would be a riding dog. So I let her have it.
The party just leveled up to level two. I am doing this less "XP based" leveling, and moreso "when I deem right". I know when the party will need to be certain levels, so when they finish certain things, *bam*, level.
However, I am having trouble finding any ruling on if the dog would level as well. The player does plan on making this dog her animal companion, which is fine, and it has contributed a lot to the party already.
So the base question is should the dog level with a party by normal monster advancement means until it starts leveling as an animal companion? (If there is a source that says one way or another, I'd love to see it)
Either convert it to trained wolf now, let it take levels as a monster, make him wait till he can transform it into his animal companion (summoned creature), make them take a separate animal companion(summoned, undying, ect) and treat the dog as a friend, or consider the german shepard as a hireling because he feeds it. You can roll a D6 and reroll 6s, Hail Eris.
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Well, the problem with leveling the dog is when the ranger takes it as their AC at level 4 it's going to take a massive reduction in stats. A riding dog has pretty comparable stats to the starting Dog AC as it is, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to leave the dog at it's current stats (it's already a CR 1, same as a 2nd level PC).