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[Skyrage]

How the heck do I actually butcher an animal?

I've made the animals avaliable for butchering in the animal menu, and I've got a butchery in place with a willing dwarf and all, but the tasks doesn't get executed since it claims that I need a butcherable item nearby...

Am I missing a step or two by any chance?

[JimBadger]

The butcher an animal command at the workshop looks for a butcherable, dead animal in the refuse pile (or in the workshop).

The slaughter animal task is separate, and will queue up automatically when you designate an animal to be butchered in the animals screen.

You will see the taks "Slaughter an animal" or somesuch appear in a butcher's workshop.  This has never appeared right away for me, but I don't know why.  Maybe the butcher has to go and find the animal first, or something.  I've never observed it.

[Skyrage]

Well, ok, how do you slaughter one then?

[Mechanoid]

Press Z and look at the top of the screen. You'll see a bar with the words "Animal" and "Kitchen" When you press ENTER, you'll be brought into the selected screen (4 + 6 scroll left + right)

Make sure "Animals" is in bright white. When it is, press enter. You'll now see a list of animals and their owners. Press enter to enable /disable turning the animal into a pet, and b to enable /disable butchering. Just realize that you can't kill an animal that's owned by a dwarf!

[Skyrage]

Well, that's what I've done already but nothing happens...I've got several animals readied for slaughtering and have had that for ages.

[JimBadger]

Your butcher shops aren't all set to repeat "butcher an animal" are they?

[JimBadger]

Actually, forget that, they clearly won't be because of the "need butcharable item" message.

So...ummm....me thinks for a bit

[Marvin Runyon]

I had a question about "meat chunks."

I set my horse and mule to be slaughtered, and the butchers auto-queued it. I ended up with some barrels getting a few units of meat and fat, but then there were horse and mule chunks that ended up in the refuse pile (BEFORE they were flagged as rotten).

The same thing happened with a raccoon that had a disagreement of opinion with one of my war dogs. Some raccoon meat in a barrel, more (non-rotten) raccoon chunks on the refuse pile.

What do I need to do to prevent perfectly good meat chunks from rotting quietly in the refuse pile? Is it a job for the kitchens? Do cooking dwarfs run out and grab meat chunks from refuse piles, or is it already too late by the time they're thrown away?

[X]

There are some bits of animal that dwarves are too civilised to eat. I guess maybe you could request a bloat where you could pickle the chunks and sell them off to Eastern Europeans. Or feed them to the dogs, someone else suggested.

X

[Jason482]

To the OP, is your butcher shop set up in a way that the dorf can actually get inside it? Check the wiki for the 'passable' tiles in a butcher shop, and make sure your shop is situated in such a way to allow the dorf to get into the center square along those passable tiles. I've seen problems with that before.

[DMofDOOM]

Here are a couple more things.
1) for the Slaughter/Butcher of animals, I pick a dwarf with a weapon, WoodCutter/Carpenter/Butcher, this seems to work better.
2) for the meat chunks, try setting the Food stockpile to TakeFrom the Refuse stockpile, I'm not sure if that was what did the trick but I got my meat chunks pulled and made food from, I think....

[bbb]

don't need weapons. it might help if you keep the victims caged close to the butcher shop.. otherwise your dwarf might have to walk a million miles to find the victim.

don't suppose your victims are inaccessible? (eg behind locked doors)

the other thing is... your dwarf might have been queued to butcher a corpse (which then rotted.. or there isn't even a corpse) just leave everything automatic, no need to bother queuing anything in the butcher shop really.

might also speed things up by turning all other jobs (aside from butchering) off.