I can't think of them ever having any canonical appearances other than in tech specs and profiles.

One issue with the domesticated wildlife theory -- according to the Action Masters' original lore, after discovering that Nucleon stripped them of their ability to transform, the Action Masters modified/developed their weapons and vehicles as transformable partners. There's really isn't any evidence to suggest that the animal AM partners were some form of domesticated Turbofox. :/ Also the TV commercial refers to some of the partners as "battle droids," which to me suggests A.I. over actual sentience.

At any rate, TFwiki states, "They display personalities of their own and are sometimes very highly skilled. However, their origin is largely unknown, as is their exact level of sentience."
So yeah... there just doesn't seem to be a definitive answer.

Quote Originally Posted by BigTransformerTrev View Post
The only ones I can think of are Push-Button serving drinks in DW (and we are not discussing him since he is not an animal anyway) and Wingthing turning up in a group shot, although he just got a new toy (recolured Ratbat) which is quite cool and maybe lends credence to the 'all are equal' idea.
Artoo Detoo served drinks aboard Jabba's barge in Return of the Jedi -- but he's still a non-sentient artificially intelligent droid. As for Wingthing, simply having an 'autonomous' Transformer body doesn't necessarily make that Transformer sentient per se, because we have had some Transformers similar to this who have been explicitly stated to be artificially intelligent non-sentients; e.g. Godbomber and Zoom-Zoom.