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[Aslandus]

Well you could, but you'd have to catch it directly from the wild then drop it in without taming it and hope it gets pissed off enough to start fighting...

[StagnantSoul]

My !!SCIENCE!! has begun. I've put [COMMON_DOMESTIC] in all trainable animals, elephants, gorillas, all those. I managed to embark with elaphants, grizzlys, rhinos, and gorillas. I'll have fifteen danger rooms, using 2X2 square rooms, with training spears from three different woods, fungi wood, tower cap, and feather wood. One room will have one training spear per spot, another two, and so on until I hit five. I'm hoping the elves bring me giant lions/tigers/jaguars, because I have no representation of the giant big cat family.

[Tacomagic]

You'll probably want to do some swim training as well.  Swimming gives boosts to all the improvable physical attributes except toughness.

I don't know if it requires skill gain to get the attribute bonuses, but it's worth a try at least.

[StagnantSoul]

I suck with pumps... I followed a basic tutorial on making a bathing room for my dwarves, and flooded the entire map, killing many dwarves, animals, and goblins, but worse, my FPS.

[StagnantSoul]

In other news, the map I chose is absolutely perfect, and I meant for it to be a throwaway map once my !!science!! was done. Guess not. Once my !!science!! is done, I'll either have no war animals, or tough gorillas, grizzlys, dogs, elaphants, and rhinos.

[Tacomagic]

I suck with pumps... I followed a basic tutorial on making a bathing room for my dwarves, and flooded the entire map, killing many dwarves, animals, and goblins, but worse, my FPS.

Easy enough way around that.  Make your training room "tight" (set door to forbidden), channel out a hole in the ceiling, and bucket-brigade water in until you hit a stable 4/7.  Stop the brigade and then drop in the creature(s).  Assuming your hallway is big enough (which it probably will be), when you eventually need to extract the creature(s), opening the door will simply spread out the water and let it evaporate.

If you want to get fancy, you could also dig out the area under the training hall, channel a hole on the outside of the door, and put a grate over it.  That way, whenever you open the door, the water will run down the grate.

If you want to get really fancy, instead of a grate outside the room, put a hatche inside the room over a ramp and attach the hatch to a lever. When you're ready to let the critter out, pull the lever to drain the room.  This does have the possibility of sucking the creatures out of the room and down into your drain area, so putting a wall grate in front of the drain might be a good idea.

Granted, there are much easier ways to set that up with pumps, but using bucket brigades is simple and the risk of flooding is as close to non-existent as possible.

EDIT: Even easier/safer would be to create an airlock using a floodgate and a door (Floodgate towards the room) and put a grate down to an evaporation chamber between them.  When you're ready to let the critters out, pull a lever connected to the floodgate.  Once it's drained, you can unforbid the door.

[Tacomagic]

...

Wait a damn minute, I have war dogs that could be swimming right now!

[Chaine Maile]

Is there any way to force climbing as well as swimming? Perhaps water level variation? I picture starting with 0/7 water, raising it to 7/7 water so they jump out onto a shelf, drain the water, flush them back to the lower level with a wall of water, drain the water so unconscious ones don't drown very long (drown gains endurance and toughness), repeat.

[StagnantSoul]

Huh... I don't know. I'm not very interested in training those, especially since my grizzlies are legendary climbers already.

[BlackFlyme]

Many creatures can't climb anyways. No grasping parts (such as hands) to do so with. Though some creatures have a special flag that allows them to climb with their stance parts instead. From what I've seen, most of those also have a high natural skill in climbing as well.

[Chaine Maile]

So Giant Desert Scorpions? 

[StagnantSoul]

Okay... So war dogs, at even one spear, get broken easily. Fractured bones, bruises on every body part, all ow.
Grizzly bears react somewhat well, but seem to heal rather slowly. Fractured bones don't happen often, but still, any fractures are bad.
Gorillas, oddly, get beaten up as bad as the dogs. Knocked out teeth, fractures bones, broken bones, even on one spear.
Elephants, however, get only bruises, and heal DURING training. I suggest modding their grazer value to something reasonable. Up until four spears, no fractures at all. Four and five though, ow. Five have a fractured skull, and four had a broken tail. Rhinos fare just as well, no significant changes.

I'd imagine big cats would do good, since they seem to be excellent dodgers. But that defeats the point, doesn't it?
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That was the good news... The bad news: the skill gain is a ridiculous crawl, so slow that, without extreme micro management, this isn't a viable idea. I haven't tried dragons, I bet they'd fare quite well against ten spears, considering I've seen bronze spears glance off their scales.
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The weight of spears DOES cause some good changes. With tower-cap and fungi-wood, fractures got to my elaphants in the trunks and ears commonly. With feather wood, they didn't happen, not even with more spears and time.

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The results of my !!SCIENCE!!? If you have time on your hands, this can help you get slightly stronger animals, but a swimming chamber, as suggested above, may be better. I'll leave that to someone else. For now, onto crushing goblin sieges with a ton of trained animals! This map is great.

[Chaine Maile]

Make sure you use no masterwork spears. Also, a popcorn Popper may give some more controlled damage. Figure out an item weigh to use. I suggest the first try be 3000 lead bars in the Popper and work down from there.

[StagnantSoul]

I was using base quality, all brought from embark. Not sure why gorillas got it so bad: I'd imagined them faring potentially the best. The pasture for my elephants is a checkerboard of moss and one feather wood training spear. Not too sure how that popcorn thing would work. Never even heard of it. Wouldn't lead bars be breaking bones and cracking heads? If not, I could put one over a danger room.

[Larix]

I'd recommend not to bother with swimming/climbing training, because if you use actual animals, this will go nowhere because they never gain skills.

I'm somewhat mystified as to what you're trying to achieve - unless you make your animals intelligent, they can't gain skills. Even if (big if) attributes can be trained, they appear to have only a minuscule influence on combat performance and any potential benefits from training-room attribute gains would have a hard time compensating for the efficiency losses from wounding/scarring/crippling/death in the "training" process.