I don’t know why this is even a thing. Even manually clicking Growl or putting it in a macro or hotkey, it does nothing. I can see forcing it to be useless in current content where people might troll with it or bad hunters might mess up tanks, but it’s absurd that the current hurdle my overleveled hunter is facing while trying to solo some old raids is that my pet cannot keep any aggro whatsoever. I can just barely beat some bosses, and others I can reliably get down to 3-10%. If I could use a core feature of my class - my pet - I wouldn’t be having any issues at all.
Sorry to hear you are having difficulties. Do you think its been forgotten that a Hunters survivability is dependent on their pet being able to act as an aggro magnet?
Have you tried a flat-out pet attack with growl to pull the mob off you ? What does misdirect do?
This can be very frustrating, but there are work arounds.
Open with misdirect, and always do so before you go into dumping CDs. This will pocket a ton of aggro into your pet. Feign will also reset aggro in a pinch