So can you not butcher dead animals, I've tried to butcher recently starved/killed weasels, cows, horses, dogs, and yaks, but I've always gotten a error that there isn't an unrotten carcase nearby.
I know this is a late reply, and I know this question comes up
all the freakin' time, but I was disappointed not to see a correct answer to this iteration of it.
There are two different jobs that can take place in a Butcher Shop:
butchering and
slaughtering.
Butchering is when you take an animal corpse and chop it into meat and bones and skin and stuff. Butchering takes a while. You can only butcher a corpse if all of the following are true:
- The animal was wild (the corpse must not say "Stray").
- The animal was not sentient (no butchering elves or goblins or humans).
- The animal was large enough (I don't know the exact cut-off point).
Butchering
does not require a refuse stockpile. The previous answer stating that corpses must be brought to a refuse stockpile before they can be butchered was
wrong. The only thing that matters is proximity. Dump (and reclaim) the corpse near the Butcher Shop, or build a new Butcher Shop near the corpse.
Slaughtering is when you take a live animal to the Butcher Shop and chop it into meat and bones and skin and stuff. Slaughtering is
instantaneous. You can only slaughter an animal that is
not wild (doesn't have to be all the way domesticated -- any partial taming is enough).
If a non-wild animal dies of starvation, injury, old age, or any other cause that wasn't slaughtering, you can't butcher it. Ever. It's just a useless hunk of waste material. You can atom-smash it, or dump it in magma. That's it.