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Any particular reason you're limited to one or t'other? I tend to make roughly equal amounts of both.

Animals:

• Not possible without vegetation.

Pigs and poultry.  Yes, it beggers the imagination to wear turkey leather clothing, but it works.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Look if your dwarves are all bikers and prostitutes go black leather, if they're normal hard working communist midgets go cloth

[Niyazov]

I try to avoid leather clothing because some of the animal names are so long that you can't easily figure out what an item is because the name gets cut off on most screens. I'm looking at you, giant peach-faced lovebird.

[NW_Kohaku]

I try to avoid leather clothing because some of the animal names are so long that you can't easily figure out what an item is because the name gets cut off on most screens. I'm looking at you, giant peach-faced lovebird.

Awww.... But he LOVES you.

Any particular reason you're limited to one or t'other? I tend to make roughly equal amounts of both.

Either one would require a large farming or animal industry, which for one reason or another some players wouldn't have access to.

Animals:

• Not possible without vegetation.
• Lots of animals.
• Evil biomes = hohohohohohoho

Plants:

• No above ground access/rope reeds = during Winter/Fall = only pig tail reserves from the last two seasons.
• No farming space

Yeah, that's not really an accurate statement of pros and cons...

An overwhelming number of animals don't graze and still provide leather.  They can also reproduce like nobody's business.

The main drawbacks to animals (and why I don't use them) is that having huge numbers of animals will lag your game, butchering animals doesn't remove them from memory or prevent those animals from being checked in game, so every dead animal produces permanent FPS loss, and you have to usually manually select animals for butchering, which is boring micromanagement.

Pig tails, meanwhile take farcically little space to start a clothing industry on - the 9 tiles you would use for another workshop is about enough to keep one clothier going.  Running rope reeds year-round is not at all hard, even "without aboveground access" because you can put a roof over the farm, so long as the tiles have been touched by sunlight even once.  Even with strict underground-only farming, you can just double the number of tiles and farm twice as many pig tails in those two seasons, and grow dimple cups or something in the other two seasons.  Cloth is also more valuable, and it doesn't take micromanaging butcher designations to run.

[Akura]

Look if your dwarves are all bikers and prostitutes go black leather,

Considering the dwarven birth rate...

[osmo]

Or you could capture a single GCS and henceforth have all the high value silk you could need. I currently use an untamed one with two chambers that alternate between enwebbing and collecting phases. Collection is really the limiting step, the spider itself is rather productive.
Absent an arachnid slave, plant cloth is also good. I prefer rope reeds for the year-round availability, I think there may also a slight issue with crop loss during season changes with pigtails. But, like all farming, it's pretty easy and efficient, especially with skilled planters.
What must surely take the cake for uselessness is yarn, though. It combines the disadvantages of leather - animal micromanagement, grazers, FPS loss, potentially lots of different types cluttering the stock menu- with an additional production step, low value, and cloth material requirements. It seems a bit silly to me that alpaca mittens should be worth less than those made of rope reed, but then, I'm not a dwarf, I guess.

[Hamek McEisenfaust]

I decided to try and create a silk farm, based off the wiki silk farm article. I created everything as listed in the wiki, the three bridges, metal doors, the whole shot. using a captured siege goblin and nothing. the spider just sits there without shooting a single web. on the other hand, i have a pair of spiders along the edge of my entrance area and they are constantly shooting webbing at anything that passes near my entrance. seeing as im still using .07, have changes been made to the GCS web shooting, because im getting zip from a silk farm.

[osmo]

I used the principles laid out in the design in the wiki, but went for a wild spider with tame bait instead and decided to build two rooms, so one could be harvested while the other one is being blasted. I thought the goblin, with all the LOS shielding required, introduced unnecessary complication into the setup, and I didn't have a captured one available in any case when I built the farm. Note that the webbing cone of the spiders is limited, and all constructions within the cone take away from the potential that can be harvested, thus reducing its efficiency, so the lighter it can be built the better. I also didn't particularly feel like modding spiders to tameable for this, as I set it up before the recent taming changes, so its function has definitely nothing to do with the latest update. With the new taming system, there's yet another reason to go for a wild spider - unless your civ has for some reason domesticated GCS, it will revert to the wild state eventually, unless it receives continued reinforcement training. Which in this case it can't, seeing as it's secluded in a silk farm. To make things worse, other animals I've had revert to the wild state were subsequently immune to cage traps, leaving me with little choice but killing them.
I did use the tightly shut door trick in my design, although I'm not sure it's even strictly necessary, as my spider now continues to blast the bait even when fully locking the access doors, after initially having established a path to the bait. One hickup I encountered was that I originally intended to use cats for this. The GCS ignored those, presumably owing to their 'at peace with wildlife' attribute. When I replaced the cats with spider monkey children, everything went as I had hoped.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The silk farm in my current fort. The right hand side is being harvested right now, although the dwarves generally tasked with this seem to be showing typical dwarven efficiency, i.e. are notable by their absence. Four looms for collection are at the bottom. The left hand side is being webbed. The tame spider monkey children used as bait are held in place by chains.

[Loud Whispers]

Yeah, that's not really an accurate statement of pros and cons...

I'd say that's because it wasn't a statement of pros and cons, it was a statement of the most common situations where either industry is hard to start :|