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[brokegamer]

I have an abundance of animals in cages and in pastures that my dwarves aren't butchering. The pastures are getting pretty trampled and I'm running out of space, I've had a few animals starve to death already because of the backlog. They aren't even butchering the corpses. Any insight into this would be helpful.

Troubleshooting I have done:

I have three butcher workshops, none have any management stuff enabled and none are forbidden, the building material is not forbidden. Nothing gets queued in the workshops despite numerous animals set to be slaughtered, I also tried a work order to no avail.
I have three or four dwarves with butchering and animal hauling enabled, and several hunters constantly patrolling. None of them are "missing" (ie dead) and they all carry out other duties like hauling. I have seen them idling (not on break, just no job).
Existing corpses are not forbidden, cages are not forbidden, the contents of the cages is not forbidden.
Work orders include auto-butcher.
No one is throwing a tantrum.
Waited a while. I know dwarves are sometimes slow, but literally nothing has been slaughtered for maybe a year or so.

Thankfully I have thousands of prepared meals already, but the sight of a couple dozen capybaras trapped in cages is making me sad. They're getting tossed into the arena soon enough anyway, but I'd at least like to use their corpses afterwards.

[Urist McMontros]

Too far from the butcher's shop maybe? I know corpses too far from the butcher's shop do this, but not sure about caged animals. Definitely seems odd that they wouldn't slaughter live animals if you've set them to SLAUGHTER in the z-menu.

[Larix]

Two likely problems:
trapped capybaras will be non-tame creatures, and butchers will not slaughter wild critters. They must be tamed first.
creatures that die of starvation must be tame, and the corpses of tame creatures will not be rendered into meat. To get meat from tame creatures, you have to drag them to the butchery and slaughter them. You _can_ butcher the corpses of wild creatures.

So you seem to have gotten an important part of the process backwards.
Are your butcher workshops actuall accessible? If dwarfs cannot path into a workshop, they just won't take a job there without further notice. And if you really urgently want your butchers to butcher, disable all conflicting labours, especially hauling. Dwarfs love to haul stuff and will gleefully run away from more important jobs to shift a solitary plump helmet on the other end of the map.
You could also enable butchery on more dwarfs, slaughtering animals is instantaneous and there's no quality involved, so dwarf skill is largely irrelevant.

[brokegamer]

Two likely problems:
trapped capybaras will be non-tame creatures, and butchers will not slaughter wild critters. They must be tamed first.
creatures that die of starvation must be tame, and the corpses of tame creatures will not be rendered into meat. To get meat from tame creatures, you have to drag them to the butchery and slaughter them. You _can_ butcher the corpses of wild creatures.

These are things that I was largely unaware of, doh. So capybara thrown into arena = tasty meat, but capybara in cage = waste of space. A bit strange that tame corpses won't be butchered though, but yeah I've been waiting for all these wild animals to be dispatched before I ordered any tame ones to be slaughtered so that's why nothing has happened.

While we're on the subject of tame/wild can animals in restraints be tamed? I've been waiting a while for some storks to be tamed, they are tied up in an animal training area, they're trained but not domesticated yet. The wiki suggests yes, but it's been a while.

[Sutremaine]

An animal can only be fully tame if it's trained before it becomes an adult. If your storks are adults captured from the wild, they will never become fully tame.

Presumably, the in-game rationale for not slaughtering a wild animal is that while the animal will tolerate being dragged around to be chained, pastured, or pitted, it will not be so docile when the butcher's knife comes out.

[fractalman]

If it's even partially trained, I think you can slaughter it? (z-animal tab-(t)rainer)
The training process needs to be started in a cage. 

But if it's fully wild, you can always send it into a grinder for extra hides but maybe less meat.  or better yet, undead bacon facility..

[Urist McOriginalname]

You can disable all dumping zones on the map and place one directly on butchers shop, then assign the corpse to be dumped and later unforbid and your dwarves will do the job if you kindly ask them.

It's extremely annoying to do, but I've noticed it helps after my hunter runs out of bolts just as the mountain goat dies from slowly and painfully suffocating in it's own blood as the hunter leaves to pick up more ammo and forgets what kind of crime against nature he just did or when you forget to pasture your horse on a zone with grass and you want to forget how you just made an innocent horse slowly and painfully drown in it's own blood as it starves to death.

[DonutDrizzle]

I find if I have this problem that placing a corpse stockpile under the body/ies for a few ticks then removing it usually gets the job done.
If not are you sure that the bodies aren't rotten?
Hope this helped