Broadsword Online Games announced, late last week, that there would be some changes to the release schedule for Ultima Online’s
Publish 97:

We are making a few adjustments to pet AIs and will not be publishing today, our new scheduled date to publish to Origin, Izumo and Baja is Tuesday April 18th, 2017. We will be updating TC1 with the latest changes, keep an eye on the wiki for the latest list of updates.

Also, as of May 1st we will be making additional stable slots available from the Ultima Store.

Finally, as a celebration of Easter and the dawning of Spring make sure you visit the Justice Falls and look for the pink squirrel to claim a gift. These gifts will not be available until all shards have been updated with Publish 97 later this month.

Shortly thereafter, they released an update for Publish 97 on the Test Center shard, which — again — expanded pet taming and training options.

And as of today, Publish 97 has gone live on the Origin, Izumo, and Baja shards:

We have published Origin, Izumo & Baja with the latest version of Publish 97 which includes the following changes.   Also visit the individual wiki pages on the Discovering Animal Training Quest, Animal Training, and Animal Training Abilities to learn more.

We want to thank everyone who took the time to test Publish 97 and send in feedback!

While this is not a mandatory patch, you are encouraged to update your client to the latest version before playing Origin, Izumo & Baja.  Character transfer on these shards will be disabled until Publish 97 is released world wide later this month.

So if pet taming and training is your thing in Ultima Online, you’ll want to be sure to grab this update.