Replacing Entity Classes

I want to completely replace the AI of the wolf entity. The AI of the wolf seems to be mostly in the EntityWolf class (but also seems to be a bit spread around other classes - notch doesn't seem to do code isolation very well, does he?). I was thinking, to even consider changing the wolf AI, I would have to replace the class. (Too bad Minecraft isn't Objective-C, where I could create a class category and it would just work... :/)

So far, I've worked out that I could POSSIBLY replace the EntityWolf class by creating a plugin that loads on startup and uses a custom class loader to load my own EntityWolf class first before loading the world would cause the class to load. This seem very hacky and prone to not working properly, however, and I want to know if there's a better way to do this? I know a bunch of plugin coders have gone a lot deeper than this - Spout specifically - and if they perhaps know a better way to do this nonsense?

Thanks for any possible insight.

 

Have you seen this tutorial that Jacek put together? http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/tutorial-how-to-customize-the-behaviour-of-a-mob-or-entity.54547

 

I had not, but now I have! I knew there was an easier way to do this! Thank you very much, Mr. desht!