How are pet talents different from pet skills?
When you tame your pet (or when you first log in with an existing pet after Patch 3.0), your pet knows all the pet skills it is ever going to know. As it levels, it will automatically learn new ranks of those skills with absolutely no work on your end. The set of skills that your pet knows is uniquely determined by its family. Talents, on the other hand, have to be bought with talent points. Each rank of each talent costs a point. A new pet doesn’t know any talents at all, and your pet won’t automatically learn new ranks of talents. The set of talents that your pet knows depends on you — and what you want to buy — but the set of possible talents is shared among all the pet families that use that tree. You can learn more about the changes to pet skills in Patch 3.0 FAQ – Pet Skills.
