The pets in my fortress are being thrown on a trash heap to rot, and it's not making the owners very happy. The wiki says that pets are placed in the graveyard, like dead dwarves, but that doesn't happen for me. And although I've got coffins and burial receptacles set up to accept dwarves AND pets, only dwarves get buried in them. And no, I didn't change the setting in init.txt.
I did a search here and found a similar question from 2006 (when I tried to reply, the forum suggested I start a new post). My situation is similar, but not exactly the same. In both cases (the only pets who've died so far, and this is my first game), the pets were dogs - one hunting dog and one war dog - who were assigned to their owners. But they DID have names (unlike how the previous poster described it) and their owners mourn them as pets.
Any ideas? Why aren't these dogs treated as 'pets'? (I assume that's the problem.)
And a couple of other questions: If I change the init.txt setting to disallow pet burial, will the owners still become unhappy that their pets are rotting away? I'd just as soon build more coffins, if it will keep them happy.
And can I change this setting in the middle of a game? I don't have any pets in coffins yet, but I do have the coffins set up that way. I don't want to bomb the game.
Thanks,
Bill