Not sure if this is a bug or just something I've never encountered before because I've never been offline for long stretches before...

So I've been gone for a few months, and all my pets are now showing as dead and starving. When I mouseover them, it says they "won't revive until fed". I've hired a stablehand, but apparently she's not feeding them? I have one pet ( https://www.sylestia.com/view/pets/?petid=3547881 ) who I revived by hand and is also showing as slowly going hungry.

Unfortunately I don't have money (I have ~2k gold, need about 100k) to revive or feed everyone, so if the stablehand can't help me, I'm stuck trying to work up enough gold again on my party pets to then use the "feed all/revive all" buttons manually. Did I just not notice before and the stablehand takes some gold to do the feeding, plus her normal wage to stick around?

Yes, the stable hand still requires gold everyday for feeding your pets on top of the fee to hire her, it's just a largely reduced fee over what you would pay without her (depending on the number of pets you have). For example, I have 3,864 pets and it costs me 7,728 gold per day for the stable hand to feed my pets (equals 2 gold per pet per day). The more pets you have, the less it costs per pet to feed everyone.

Ah, maybe that's the reason then. Thanks!