No kidding. Or, when I'm pet tanking because the tank pulled before the healer was quite ready, a little help on healing the turtle would be excellent.

To be honest? With your pet's innate 90% AOE damage reduction, plus stopping to throw out a Mend Pet every so often if you notice he's taking hits (and I believe 2 out of the 3 specs even have passive pet healing), plus any passive healing you get with the right party class comp, if your pet is taking so much damage that the healer needs to throw him a heal, I can confidently say you are probably doing something wrong.

Barring those fringe instances where your pet is offtanking or got hit with a nasty random spell, a pet shouldn't be taking that much damage that the hunter can't handle it. Yes, that might mean repositioning your pet if he's standing in a cleave/fire/what have you, it might even mean pulling him out of mele for a second. But poor pet management is no excuse to blame the healer.

End rant. :P As both a healer and a hunter, I see this happen FAR too often.

To be honest? Pets die. It happens.

Mend Pet heals for 5% a tick, and if we (hunters) are kiting any mob that hits harder than 10k/sec, they will die. That usually don't occur on bosses (except on Hagaras lightning phase) but sometimes trash have some nasty melee range damage that hits our pets like a truck, and no Mend Pet would ever be able to save them.

I really, really, REALLY wish every HUNTER realised that... you would not believe how many times we have to remind hunters to rez pets, have the right pet out, stop their pet attacking the wrong target, or just plain here as your pulling "I forgot my pet". *facepalm*

To be honest, this makes me want to go about killing hunter pets. Just so I can have lots of little wingéd craters in Arizona.

Things that kills pets:

Damage.

Things that stop pets from dying:
-90% dmg reduction from AoE
-Glyphed Mend Pet. You did glyph... RIGHT?
-Every single 'smart heal' that heals use on cooldown. They will all target your pet if your pet has a lower % in health than a player. This list includes but is not limited to Efflorescense, Wild Growth, Prayer of Mending, Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing, Holy Nova, Holy Radiance, Chain Heal, Healing Rain, Light of Dawn, Hymn of Hope (or was that the mana one?) Tranquility, ETC.

So, if your pet, who should take 90% reduced damage from every single damage source that it would realistically receive damage from, actually dies, I'm pretty damn sure it's the hunters fault, because any healer worth their raid slot uses a healing spell that would target your pet ANYWAY.

TL;DR -- Dead pet? Dumb Hunter.

TL;DR -- You are wrong.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised by the responses. While, yes, a lot of the time our pets are very good at avoiding or massively mitigating the damage they receive so that it doesn't matter. That said, there are mechanics that can cause a pet to die unless we completely turn off around 15% if I remember correctly of our DPS off (more if we're BM) and call them to our side - but we can keep that if a few heals were thrown our pet's way every now and then.

One example off the top of my head is a lot of the Trash in Firelands - There were effects that would kill our pets after about 10 seconds or so, even with mend but constantly on them. If a healer could have thrown a heal its way every now and then, it would have been fine - but otherwise, it dies.

Yes, these situations are far and few between, but the point stands: If a DPS can do more damage with a healer healing a pet, and the healing isn't being prioritized over actual raiders, then it behooves the entire raid for the healer to heal the pet, and the pet owner to be sure there isn't another way to get the same DPS without the damage. As long as this is happening, the situation is being optimized. This goes for all pet classes too, not just hunters, though hunters gain the most DPS from their pets.