Am i the only one who trains ridiculous amounts of random animals for food/eggs/fun?
So as simple as i can make it:
In cages:
Can be trained once until it goes FULLY wild again. (even semi wild is still not enough).
After being trained, if set to butcher, will be taken from it's cage and dragged to the butchers shop.
I've only seen one time where an animals bred whilst being in a cage, and i have massive amounts of animals in some games left in cages. (100 in cages, 300 wandering).
Cannot be war/hunting trained (unless the cage they are in is on a training zone? not double checked this)
On a pasture:
Breeding happens fairly quickly.
Will use Nest Boxes (generally immediately on release, eggs may not be fertile if there has been no male of the same species on the map, or even if there has, sometimes they arn't fertile and you'll need to take em away (food stockpile/cooking)
Will generally stay in the pasture, chicks (baby birds) will require them to be added to the pasture (something about egg hatching).
Animals not requiring a nest box will automatically set their young to only use the pasture that the mother is using.
Will be trained periodically, generally every 2 months (game time) which is enough to ensure a semi wild does not become wild. The only reason a semi wild would go wild on a pasture is not enough trainers or a massive distance traveled (i.e trainer has like 300+ spaces to walk) or you've made a change such as setting no trainer for the animal.
When an animal is tame, it will produce tame offspring.
The first set of young trained can become "tame" and will not require further training afterwards (you will need to disable this though). The only way animals caught in traps from the wild can be trained to tame is by learning enough knowledge so that they are very familiar with them, this is roughly 500 times of training on that specie.
Generally you might as well set your pasture to be an animal training zone also, so you can temporarily set an animal you want war trained to that pasture and then set it an owner, then to remove it from the pasture, in general i recommend against using non tame war animals.