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[Stovepipe Arnold]

I've been playing dwarf fortress on and off for about a year, and have never managed to get butcher's shops to work outside of butchering domesticated animals. Ive never gotten people to butcher caged animals, I've never gotten people to butcher dead animals (or indeed interact with corpses beyond dumping them; I've always chalked this up to the "seeing a corpse is equivalent to watching a horrifying murder" bug).

So is utilizing a properly functioning meat industry an impossibility at the moment due to glitches? Or are there work arounds to the bugs? Having a fortress live solely off of fruit is kinda immersion breaking (and giving everyone a f***ing horrendous case of the trots).

[Nep Nep]

I've seen them eventually butcher corpses, case in point, my hunters murdered a bunch of giant emus and a giant hamster and they butchered some of the corpses (100 a piece!), giving me a lot of food and bones.

[Stovepipe Arnold]

I guess it's just random then? What I notice is that a hunter will kill an animal, then immediately nope on out of there due to the horrors of death (dafuq?). I guess the only way to reliably deal with corpses is to just have some broken army vet who doesn't give a s*** anymore working on corpse retrieval duty 

[FortunaDraken]

Probably also good to check what your standing orders are for corpses and outside refuse too, just in case those are preventing things.

[PatrikLundell]

I've never had any big problem with butchering.

I recently saw somewhere on the wiki that a workshop can butcher bodies within 43 tiles of the workshop. In addition to that, workshops can also butcher bodies stored in refuse piles anywhere (both fresh bodies of kills to yield meat etc, and old skeletons to yield bone). If you don't turn off auto butcher both of these are automatic.
I don't use hunting, but my understanding is that the hunter is supposed to haul the body to the butcher (or possibly to a refuse pile) to get it butchered. I think I've seen something about a bug with hunter hauling, though.

As far as I know, the horror of death generated by dead bodies applies only to bodies of sapients, although some dwarves might be over sensitive and care about animal kills as well. You should keep bodies (and parts and teeth) of sapients away from the regular refuse pile, away from dwarven eyes, and away from merchant eyes, since they cause bad thoughts every season they're see (and in the case of merchants, causes them to bolt and leave without any other indication than an exclamation point above the head of the merchant that saw the offending piece of invader. Bodies of sapients cannot be butchered, but if bones become available through "natural" butchering (such as severed arms from an axe) those bones can be used for bone based production, except for dwarven bone.

Butchering tame animals in cages is the same as butchery of any other tame animal, while wild caged creatures have to be killed in combat. I think you can dedesignate the creature from the cage to have it released (and possibly hurt the civilian releasing it), but the safer method is to build the cage and then hook it up to a lever and have a civilian pull the lever while the cage is surrounded by a militia squad.

It can be noted that the default setting is not to collect bodies from the outside, so any bodies of combat killed creatures on the surface will not be collected unless you change the 'o'rders-'r'efuse settings.

Also note that combat killed tame creatures cannot be butchered at all, so when the goblins kill a draft yak it's lost (I think getting a necromancer to revive it and then kill it again will make it butcherable, and I also think that's a way to revive rotten meat, since I believe I've seen creatures start to create miasma both after the original kill and after being killed while reanimated). Tame creatures can only be butchered while still alive.

[Daris]

Most wild animals can be safely led from a cage to a pasture, or to anywhere else.  If you capture a wild animal you don't want to butcher or kill, you can pit it down 1 z-level to release it.  If you want your military to kill it, you can designate a pasture around your barracks and release it there for your squads to murderize.

Once the animal is released it will behave as normal for its kind, which means your civilian may be injured by large predators.  As long as it is being dragged, it won't attack.

Put your animal corpse stockpile next to your butcher shop (or vice versa) and turn on above-ground refuse collection to have the carcasses butchered.  Very small animals, like keas or ravens, that produce only a skull when slaughtered, will not be butchered.  Animals that produce only a skull part of the time will only be butchered part of the time.

[PatrikLundell]

I've trained keas (as well as giant keas) caught while trying to invade my fortress until mastery has been achieved and then slaughtered them off. After these mass slaughters I haven't had any keas left, so I assume they have been killed. I think ravens couldn't be slaughtered the last time I was done with their training, though.

While pitting the victim sometimes break free and attack, but it might be in the junction between the hauling phase and the pitting phase. However, if Daris is correct, it would mean mass pitting should be possible to do regardless of where the source cage is located, with the same risk and risk location as for a pitting with cages located just beside the pit (provided it isn't so far the dragger decides to take a pause in the dragging).
Also, it might mean you can safely move captives to cram them all into a single cage (to cages free cages and stockpile space). I've refrained from doing so based on the risks involved in pitting.

It can be noted that hauling of untamed critters past caravan guards causes the guards to attack the critter, at least if it's one normally attacked by those guards.

[Sanctume]

As in the wiki, as long as the pit is adjacent (orthodirectionally or diagonally) to the animal stockpile with caged creatures s to be pitted, the pitting should go instantaneously. 
However, since the climbing patch version, there is a chance that creature holds onto the wall of the pit z-1 and try to climb up. 
Putting a hatch cover on the pit and forbidding the hatch will prevent climbers and flyers from escaping the pit during the pitting process.
Smoothed walls for the pit help prevent climbers.

Butchers will do the job if there is a refuse pile that has corpse in it.  More so than them to pick up a corpse on the ground and directly to the butcher shop.

[PatrikLundell]

I do have a hatch over my pit filled with magma and the hatch is forbidden. The cages are built on the 8 tiles a around the pit, and the victims still get free and cause a mess from time to time. The victims are never on fire when getting free (as they are if I forget to forbid the hatch so they climb out).
Strangely, if I order the pitting of the 8 victims at a time, either all of them seem to break free or none of them do, and this is regardless of when the dorfs get around to do the pitting (i.e. several at a time or one after the other, possibly over a fairly long time if the dorfs are busy).

[Sanctume]

Patrik, are the immediate walls z-1 of pit smoothed natural, or smooth construction blocks?

[PatrikLundell]

Unsmoothed natural, but again, the victims are never on fire, so they never got down there (magma depth 6/7). I think, but cannot swear on it, that I get cancellation messages of pitting interrupted by goblin/troll/... even when only one such action is in progress when pitting fails.

[Sanctume]

My theory is that the creature grabs hold of the natural walls and climbs out before reaching the magma.

I'm in a turn for a succession fort now, and I may be able to test the pitting (undead) soon.

[Daris]

The only escapes I've ever had in mass pitting (or any kind of pitting) is from invaders.  I pit wild crundles into magma in groups of 20+ and there are no escapes.  Even sentient "animals" like gorlaks can be safely pitted with no escapes.  Trolls that are labeled "wild animal" do not escape either, but trolls labeled "invader" sometimes do.

The first goblin pitted never escapes.  If I wait long enough between pittings, so that the first goblin is completely gone and all the smoke and junk has dissipated, subsequent goblins won't escape either.  It is the fact that there is a goblin free on the screen somewhere that leads to escapes, and there is a period of time after the goblin is dead and off the units list that the game continues to allow escapes.  I have no idea what kind of logic the game is using to determine the length of time during which escapes are possible.

Note that pitting into magma and pitting into an open volcano lead to different results.  Mass pitting into an open volcano is semi-doable.  Mass pitting into a pool of pumped-out magma is not.

[PatrikLundell]

Hm, I agree escapes probably only have happened with invaders, but given invader pitting is 50:1 vs other critters the sample is too small to be sure. I'll certainly try the one victim at a time approach next time.

[Daris]

Hm, I agree escapes probably only have happened with invaders, but given invader pitting is 50:1 vs other critters the sample is too small to be sure. I'll certainly try the one victim at a time approach next time.

I've pitted epic numbers of crundles and other junk cavern creatures.  No escapes, even when the entire fortress turns out to pit them all simultaneously.  I also pitted hundreds of goblins, so I've noted what works and what doesn't.

eta: I should also mention that there was one time that I attempted to mass-slaughter hungry heads by pasturing about 20 in the midst of my military simultaneously.  No escapes there either, and it produced some interesting results.  Every time a dwarf released a hungry head, all the nearby dwarves would produce "interrupted by hungry head" cancellation spam, and then would attempt to re-cage their captives.  The captive, non-tame hungry heads were not released when the dwarves were interrupted.  If there were no free cages (other dwarves were busy using them to reload traps) another cancellation message was generated to the effect that caging the hungry head was impossible.

This was a bad idea for stress reasons, but I learned from it that there is probably no circumstance short of physical combat that will lead to a wild animal escape.