I haven't been online in a couple of months, so I apologize if this has been brought up already.
I'm in about year 12 or 13 of a successful fort, and my dwarves suddenly stopped recognizing animal stockpiles. Empty cages are sitting in workshops, trapped critters are just left on the floor, and goblins caught by my cage traps continue to sit on top of my cage traps.
It doesn't matter if I make new stockpiles, change/change back the settings of the old stockpiles, or what. What's really odd is that I put a new setting on one of the old animal stockpiles so that it would accept coffins, and the dwarves instantly started carrying the coffins there even though there were dozens of cages still sitting on the floor (needless to say, all animal settings were still on).
I can't think of any reason this might be happening, except possibly this: if I make a new stockpile of ANY sort, I usually make it Animal to start with, and then change settings to make it what I actually want. I do this because a) if I make the right kind of stockpile, dwarves start carrying things there immediately, before I have a chance to mess with the settings, b) 'a' is the first/default option, which is easy, and c) animal stockpiles have a default barrel and bin # set to zero, so I don't have to set it by hand. I thought this was such a clever trick that I was planning to recommend it in one of the forums here.
But if I was cheerfully setting animal stockpiles and then instantly turning them to something else, I guess there's a possibility that the dwarves got confused about where to take cages, and I haven't been able to 'snap them out of it'. It's not especially damaging, but it is annoying when I'm trying to make zoos and stuff.
Any ideas?