In my current attempt at nethack I'm playing a dwarven samurai with a dog pet, so most dwarves I've encountered are peaceful. However, for some reason, my dog has been going beserk on every friendly dwarf we meet and I'd like to know why.
Since this doesn't really incur penalties on me, not to mention he was getting experience, I didn't mind it while going down the gnomish mines, but now it's becoming a problem. I've just reached Minetown and imagine my surprise when my pet decides to attack the owner of the first shop I visit. Though this still incurs no penalties, I'm afraid he's going to get zapped to death, so I have to lock him out of every shop I visit.
Now I wonder, did I do something wrong that is causing this?
I didn't catch any message like "Rex is confused with hunger." or something (plus, I almost starved because he was pouncing on every single corpse we made).
I've heard you can train your pet to steal by feeding him when he drops you stuff, is it somehow possible that I have accidentally trained him to be aggressive?
Best Answer
As far as I know, there's no way to train or otherwise cause your pet to be more aggressive. In general, pets don't much care if a monster is friendly to you or not - they'll go ahead and attack anyway, as long as the monster is close to their level.
It's quite possible that your dog has reached max level by this point in the game, especially if he's been getting a lot of kills. However, dogs don't normally attack shopkeepers, even at max level.
I can think of a couple possible explanations for your situation:
Some pertinent info from the wiki article on pets:
also