OK. So I booted but my Faerie Fort mod, and embarked on the shores of a Haunted ocean with a Haunted forest behind me. That's not important. The zombie deer don't want no aggro and the ocean seems to produce only jellyfish.
This being a Faerie fort, I could embark with cougars (you ALWAYS get cougars. They can live anywhere. They're the dwarves of the cat world. Except for being, you know, big.). So I did, 2 cougars and 2 cats.
We also got a muskox and a 2-hump camel as draft animals. Both female.
In the first year or so, because of the absence of non-undead game, we were sort of short of leather. I ordered some more animals off the fey liason and bought the jaguar the Elves bought me.
Then some migrants turned up. They had a breeding pair of Elk as pets.
Then the muskox and camel both dropped calves. How does this happen?
Then the traders came back with more cougars, another jaguar, another muskox, and a solitary leopard.
And in the meantime, the original pair of cougars had been busy.
Then we got young elk fawns.
Then we got more young camels and muskoxen.
And the cats are being remarkably invisible.
SO. Heading towards the end of year 3, my 44 Faerie are outnumbered by the animals. I've butchered surplus males and a few extremely surplus females (sparing the young) and every unattached cat I could find, but we still have over 50 animals. Cougars are the biggest group. The Muskoxen and Camels next, then there's the still small but growing family of elk. The Jaguars, thank god, are both male and the leopard is lonely. I feeling the situation slipping away from me.
This being Faerie mod, the cougars are trainable (but that's not as helpful as it sounds. War animals have a hard enough time keeping up with Dwarves and Faerie/Elves are a lot faster) I'm sure I could have no problems giving a War Cougar bodyguard to every founder and woodcutter, but I'm sure the novelty will wear off with time. The Leopard and Jaguars SHOULD be trainable, but don't seem to be. I think it's because they were bought off the Elves and have those brown wounds to organs.
This is pretty cool. But I'm a little bit scared. It's much harder to control this sort of thing than a simple catsplosion, because you have to maintain a breeding group from each separate species. Plus, all these things are valuable meat/leather animals. We SHOULD capitalize on this.
I never planned for this place to become a goddamn ranch.