I don’t like that hearthlings can have any pet…I’d like to limit or restrict pets so I’m not so much of a zoo and more of a cool dragon town, or a bug town with pyramids, or catville ha ha you know?
I’d like to be able to set pet policies (overridable if bought from market) or have a dialogue about found pets from the trapper (like once a day) where I can say yes or no to the pets they want to invite in…then I have some control and can truly make my town where I want to be. Sometimes I like a freeforall but sometimes I just want to choose my mood :D.
EDIT: Also can we please have pets trainable to haul to supply shelves, maybe even haul from finished work shelves? Would make them cute and useful! Also would be cool to see them protect their owners…all could be trainable (obedience, hauling, fighting skills)…they might even ignore the alarm bells and not go to standards if they don’t have the obedience skill 
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I recently came back to the game and that same thought came to when I bought an ostrich. The pets have no real use in the game, apart from being cute, which I don’t really care about. We should at least have the option of assigning the pets to a pasture-like zone, just like the other animals. I would also love to have the option of killing pets after releasing them, to collect their goods. The main problem with pets is how unorganized they are, a real mess.
On steam I suggested that the pets haul to and from supply shelves and finished work shelves…then they’d be cute as hell and useful! I edited to add that, thanks for reminding me!
Hmm placing animals on shelves… sounds like taxidermy to me, which I would love to see as well. You’re welcome.
lol I meant hauling to the shelves or from them LOL.
They would be like trained worker animals helping their owner out…saves workers needing to haul supplies.
It’s worth mentioning that pets have “nuzzle” and “boop” conversations with the hearthlings, which can boost morale. This gives them an inherent usefulness which is lore-friendly to their cuteness hahah.
However, I would also love to see pets getting other uses (the devs have already thrown around the possibility AFAIK), based on the type of animal. So animals which have prehensile limbs (e.g. a monkey’s tail, elephant’s/mammoth’s trunk) or which are known for carrying items IRL (e.g. ants) could be hauling pets. Animals known for a particular trait (e.g. ostriches’/cheetah’s speed, turtles’/armadillos’/beetles’ natural armour/toughness, foxes’/octopus’s intelligence) could convey a relevant buff to their owner. Combat pets are pretty obvious choices. Then, any pets which don’t fit other roles can simply be “companion pets”, which give boops and nuzzles more frequently (or more effectively) than the other pets.
That would not only give pets a variety of uses, it would also mean that the locally available pets have an impact on the available ways to play – playing in the desert would enable the player to more easily boost their hearthlings’ creativity, while playing in the forest gives more opportunity to easily boost morale, and so on. Of course these aren’t restrictions, they’re more like abundances – you can get all pet types (eventually) in all biomes anyway, it’s just that certain biomes have a wealth of certain pets available, which can be tuned to tie into the “default narrative” of each setting.
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