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[Lozzymandias]

So. My usual goblin siege is about 200 strong. Mostly its beak dog. Result: In the long and bloody cleanup afterwards, there is roughly 40-50 beak dog corpses. In practise that means theres more like 150 bits of beak dog.

I have 4 shops, butchering night and day, and 3 tanners working like billio. But they're hard pressed to process the mounty bounty before it rots.

How do you guys deal with your mounts in a timely way and delicious way?

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Dump/forbid all body parts from the stockpile menu and focus on the corpses.
Usually there are too much meat so I actually don't need to butcher them all.

[Lozzymandias]

Lotta skins you're giving up on there.

I mean yeah, leather is ten-a-dwarfbuck but its the principle of the thing

[PatrikLundell]

Capture them in cage traps. They you can kill them at a pace your butchers can keep up with (but you need a lot of cages).

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Yeah, and throw them down 50 z levels so they blow apart into as many bits as they can.

[SebasMarolo]

Capture them in cage traps. They you can kill them at a pace your butchers can keep up with (but you need a lot of cages).

What weapons should be used? Slashing weapons to maximize the number of skins, spears for "quick" (or so I have read) kills, or crushing weapons to tenderize the meat? (and since its a slower kill, maximize the xp)

[Werdna]

Declare Butchery Day and cancel all work, it's time to celebrate!  You've got the right idea, just add more Butcher and Tannery shops, and if you have a skilled butcher/tanner consider dedicating a shop to them so they're not blocked by some unskilled moron.  Mass-enable butchery and tanning on a quarter of your dwarves, and turn off their Food and Refuse hauling, so the other dwarves will be dedicated to the massive number of hauling tasks (hauling the corpse takes a lot of time in particular).  Leave all goblinite forbidden; the Yard Sale can wait!

Your Refuse pile should be right next to the shops and they will get filled fast, so set up multiple piles, an "in" pile for just bodies and an "out" refuse pile or piles for the massive amount of parts that are generated.  Watch that the "in" pile never fills completely, because if it does it means a corpse is left in the field longer to rot and they take time to haul in. 

[Slogo]

For labors like Butcher & Tanning you can also just enable it for the vast majority of your dwarves save those in the military, those you want to keep away from wandering where corpses are, and those with critical high priority jobs. Most of both skills have no quality modifiers so the only difference based on skill is time.

If you need to make parchment you can set one of the workshops to have a minimum skill required and use that to make parchment (since parchment has quality).

[PatrikLundell]

The reason Libash_Thunderhead proposes the usage of a splatterer is not (only) cruelty, but to exploit the fact that each butchering job returns a single hide, regardless of the creature size, but each creature bit large enough to be butchered returns one hide (some creatures do not produce any hides at all, e.g. snakes, but that's another matter).

[Fleeting Frames]

Though with tanning, one thing to keep with it in mind is that it is a moodable skill, so give it to dwarves whose main jobs are higher level and value moodable skills or already had mood. Don't want a legendary tanner, after all

[Findulidas]

Glad its not an evil biome. So many zombies.

[Slogo]

Though with tanning, one thing to keep with it in mind is that it is a moodable skill, so give it to dwarves whose main jobs are higher level and value moodable skills or already had mood. Don't want a legendary tanner, after all

True, but unless you are managing your dwarves to mood into smithing or masonry you'd just be trading craftdwarf moods for tanning moods.

[PopTart]

You might also consider moving your whole food preparation and dining operations closer to the surface to reduce hauling.

[Skullsploder]

Set up a huge amount of workshops in your surface fort and enable butchery and tanning for everyone, as everyone else has said. For getting the products down to the lower levels where stuff actually happens though, you can do cool stuff like digging a vertical shaft straight down to the appropriate floor, then having a minecart quantum stockpile dump into that hole, so dwarves only need to haul to the hole and drop the meat and leather (don't worry about the drop by the way, you can drop a crystal glass window 200z levels and it won't be affected at all).

[Lozzymandias]

Update:

Half of it rotted. I turned the refuse piles the bits were on into food piles and i was hoping that would stop rotting in body bits. No such luck alas. Still I got a few hundred meat out of the experience. Plus i have another 50 or so caged beak dogs to turn into beak-steak. I tend to use a diversity of defenses, so i end up with shot corpses, drowned corpses, corpses in bits and caged prisoners.

Next time everyones a butcher/tanner, and i'll have the shops ready.