A lasso is a divergent idea, and i shouldn't have brought it up here where its not appropriate. Creating a reaction with a animal as a reagent directly is quite difficult and may have come around as per me misunderstanding farming (as per bringing the sheep in to shear, technically you couldn't do it without the "sheep reagent" so to speak, unfortunately I am personally unaware where i might view the innards of that reaction or who to speak to)
Shearing is not a reaction
That's a interesting insight. Im aware its not a modifiable civ reaction, and more of a untouchable base game thing, maybe i was looking at it the wrong way. Instead of the dwarf dragging the sheep to conduct a workshop routine with the shearing stat attached, a pre-defined job attached to 'shearing' that occurs only within the boundaries of the workshop?
Mmm, knowing this modding tools could probably automate shearing by providing a ban of particular animals and determining suitability by state to automatically queue up shearing jobs on selected animals.
The workshop collects the wool inside however, that in itself doesnt make much sense besides workshops just having inherent properties to just store things that are left in them (in some roundabout way, inferring you could use a workshop for storage/movement of goods if you found some other way of connecting it to a item movement system such as hands free minecart access)
How the AI selects the animal based off the tag itself is another thing of interest to modding.
Workaround:
Reaction adds interaction to worker (dwarf).
Interaction transform creature into another creature.
New creature instantly dies and leaves itemscorpse.
Itemcorpse can be sold at trade-depot.
Itemcorpse can be used in custom workshop to spawn the original creature.
The interaction could be like your wrestling idea (range 1), or your lasso idea (range 10, but requires a lasso in the reaction)
Problem: you have to make one sell/spawn reaction (and accompanying dfhack stuff), plus item, for each single creature. And that is needless pain.
EDIT - The future is procedural mods, or mods that have a corpus of the current raws taking place in effect to reference from (again, quite absurd, wouldn't push my luck, dont hit me with your criticism stick before you hear me out)
In that sense my suggested workaround is to make a midwife programme that reads and categorises (I mentioned this before with a spawn creature portfolio) the raws of creatures (dwarf therapist hybrid?) including the base value of a creature (which will naturally be negated as per civilisation demand and appraisal anyway phooeying that arguement) to identify them so that in conjunction with dfhack it can be compressed into a flexible depository via a anonymous-script.
Oooor, like arena mode, just have a big list that draws off the aspects of the current world as it is just by reading that. (would be chucking out the capabilities to engineer creatures on the fly by slotting off exclusive creatures into the midwife application)