This has a lot to do with the other corpse-rather-than-junk-collection threads, but I figured it belonged under separate cover.
I've got a dragon camped out in the forest, and he's making my life a living hell. Generally I could keep the dwarves away from him until he started killing elephants. Then, they constantly started getting tasked to collect the elephant bones. This might not be so bad if the elephant bones were worth something, and if, to get to them, they didn't walk past fresh butcherable elephant corpses, and piles of weapons and equipment from old caravan guards, and the huge amount of meat I purchased from the last caravan that they allowed to rot. It got so bad that I turned off gathering refuse from outdoors, and then gathering refuse altogether; neither actually stopped these jobs from being created. (I guess maybe that's a bug report, if it hasn't been reported before.)
I have two suggestions. First, make bones the last thing that any dwarf gathers if there's anything else to pick up. Second, we've got the Dwarves Save Bones/Dwarves Chasm Bones switch on the Refuse Orders menu. I assume this pertains to bones removed from corpses during butchery. How about a third option -- "dwarves don't gather bones"? With "Dwarves Save Bones" they try to get them all; with "Dwarves Don't Gather" they're discounted as gatherable refuse but the ones created in the butchery process are kept (I don't know if that sort of distinction is possible), and with "Dwarves Chasm", they don't gather them and chuck all the ones they get from butchery into the chasm.