Butcher shops also don't give a hoot about refuse piles. Corpses sitting on the floor are tasked without trouble, the only requirement is that the corpse must be close enough. You can simply dump the corpse near the butcher's shop, then reclaim it.
This is directly counter to my own experience. Are you manually queuing up butcher animal jobs when you do this?
If something butcherable is in a refuse pile, it'll create a 'butcher animal' job regardless of how far away the butcher's is. Sometimes good, sometimes not.
In retrospect, it's possible I developed a mistaken impression while still under the influence of the burrows bug, which wreaked havoc on my meat industry in several of my early forts.
In any case, there is plenty of misinformation on these forums without me adding to it, so apologies if I've inadvertantly done so.
I have received both answers, and right now lots of corpses sit not being used by my butcher shop. Stockpile is outside, workshop is just inside; approximately 60 spaces between them.
Have you created any burrows? The bug that I referred to will prevent workshops from using items that are in stockpiles if the workshop is included in a burrow and the stockpile isn't. This is true even without any active burrow restrictions. If your refuse pile is on the surface, and you've created a civ alert burrow that restricts surface activity, then simply adding your refuse pile to that burrow should help. Or even creating a new burrow that only includes your refuse piles and the butcher/tanner/craftsdwarf shops. The burrow doesn't need any dwarves assigned to it to sort the bug out.