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[AceSV]

A quick tip about breeding animals, if you train a child animal it will become domesticated, permanently tame, and never need to bother your animal trainers again.  However, several animals, especially cave animals, will be "born" as adults, which means they can never be tamed.  I know for sure that Giant Toads are such creatures, and I think Giant Cave Spiders are too, but I've never caught two at once.  So compared to a Cave Crocodile or an Elk Bird, which can be fully domesticated, Giant Toads may not represent the best use of your animal trainers' time.  It also costs meat to tame them. 

A breeding population of non-domesticatable animals may overwhelm your animal trainers, especially if unexpected catastrophes knock your trainers out of action.  Likewise, if you run out of meat to train them with.  This can result in training decay, eventually causing the Giant Toads to go wild again and attack your dwarves, and Giant Toads are plenty dangerous enough to kill a couple dwarves before going down.  (But you can also use this mechanic to your advantage in military applications) 

Which is not to say there is no benefit to raising Giant Toads.  They can be a useful source of meat and as they said, high value bones and leather, or you can pasture them near your entrances to chase off (or more accurately fight off) other dangerous cavelife.  To breed them, they need a source of water.  If you let them wander around the fortress, they're going to spend their time cruising your dining rooms and statue gardens instead of making tadpoles, so make sure you pasture them in an area with water.  The same is true for Giant Olms if you encounter them. 

Another odd thing I've never really experimented with is that dwarves outside of your fortress do not suffer these penalties to domestication.  I think it's possible that you can trade your trained Giant Toads to caravans (not the wild ones) and they may one day trade back a fully domesticated Giant Toad.  I also think if you see the message "the dwarves of such-and-such are now expert Giant Toad trainers" your civ will be able to embark with Giant Toads, although exotic animals cost insane amounts of starting points.  I assume that if that works, it would also work with the GCS. 

[TheFlame52]

Only the initial training from wild to trained costs meat. All other trainings are free.

[Dunamisdeos]

A quick tip about breeding animals, if you train a child animal it will become domesticated, permanently tame, and never need to bother your animal trainers again.  However, several animals, especially cave animals, will be "born" as adults, which means they can never be tamed.  *snip snip snip snip*

Now, I was pretty sure that children inherited the training status of the parents. So a semi-wild GCS would create semi-wild children, which can then be tamed, which will spawn tamed GCS.

Maybe my info is outdated, I usually just drop whatever animals I have on invaders. Sometimes its Cave Crocs, sometimes its Goats.

[Dwarf4Explosives]

Nope, you need the [CHILD] tag on an animal for it to pass on its training status to its child. Also, if I remember correctly, the only status that a trained animal's child can have is "Tamed", which makes them permanently friendly. Also, you can't make an animal domesticated. Your civ will never have access to the animal, even if you sell them a dozen fully-trained breeding pairs of [insert normally wild animal here].

[Saiko Kila]

Also, if I remember correctly, the only status that a trained animal's child can have is "Tamed"

Status is inherited after the mother, so child must be trained once to become Tamed. If the child grows too fast (which can happen easily with mischievous, flying or climbing creatures, especially in wooden areas) then it won't be Tamed, ever.

[Niddhoger]

Nope, you need the [CHILD] tag on an animal for it to pass on its training status to its child. Also, if I remember correctly, the only status that a trained animal's child can have is "Tamed", which makes them permanently friendly. Also, you can't make an animal domesticated. Your civ will never have access to the animal, even if you sell them a dozen fully-trained breeding pairs of [insert normally wild animal here].

Sadly this is true.  You will never be able to gain civilization wide domestication with animals they didn't start with access too.  HOWEVER, you can pass training knowledge back to your civilization.  When you embark again with the same civ, your trainers will have an easier time training the animal in question.  Again though, you won't start with cave crocs domesticated- you'll just have an easier time training them. 

As far as running out of meat/losing trainers... not all animals need meat.  Its also why you make sure you can seal off your animal training zone.  I don't think any animals you'll be training are BD2 other than dragons, so a stone/metal door should suffice.  If you realize an animal has gone semi-wild and you don't havea trainer/food to keep it tame... you can seal it in and recapture it.  I'd recommend building a (sealed) backup pasture so you can isolate these animals. 

[Skuggen]

I remember my first encounter with a GCS. I wasn't aware of how dangerous they could be, so I just ordered my squad of poorly-trainer, poorly-equipped melee militia to kill it.
It went about as well as you can expect... The militia killed it with no issues beyond getting stuck in webs for a while... Don't think anyone was injured.

Now that I know how dangerous the damn things are they effortlessly slaughter my soldiers.