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[Granite26]

So there's lots of talk about cats overbreeding.  I'd like to posit the opinion that the cat issues are very similar to the elf issues in world gen.  As in, they don't get killed to way every other breeding pet does.

Dogs die all the time doing real work.  The other animals are all killed for food. 

People have this silly notion that cats aren't food, and yet they don't do anything dangerous the same way dogs do. 

Add that to fact that they have the most effective self defense mechanism (choosing an owner), and you've got pure evil.

Any other reasons cats are a problem?

[Sir Doober]

They have no use apart from eating them and chaining them outside so they can yell 'THIEF, PROTECT THE HOARD!' whenever someone suspicious walks by.

You have pretty much explained why I use them as portable sentries as well as portable breakfast.

[Sean Mirrsen]

They're also vermin hunters. You can make them trainable and bypass their independence by assigning them as war animals, but hunting cats? War cats?

The only real solution is to give vermin bodies and let them defend themselves (it would require code changes, vermin can't have bodies currently).

[Paul]

Heh, I can see it now. "Stray cat has been struck down!" "Dwarf cancels eat, interrupted by raging cockroach"

I set my cats to [NO_GENDER]. This makes them not breed and not select owners. I also have them set to not die of old age, so I can bring one or two at the start and keep them around forever to hunt vermin. I just pretend they're breeding slowly and replacing the ones that would normally die without clogging up my fort

[Granite26]

Heh, I can see it now. "Stray cat has been struck down!" "Dwarf cancels eat, interrupted by raging cockroach"

I set my cats to [NO_GENDER]. This makes them not breed and not select owners. I also have them set to not die of old age, so I can bring one or two at the start and keep them around forever to hunt vermin. I just pretend they're breeding slowly and replacing the ones that would normally die without clogging up my fort

I may do this in the future...

[Overdose]

Overdose's way of dealing with cats:
Step 1 - Let your cats all take up that same owner, and label them Crazy Cat Dwarf

Step 2 - Make said dwarf a military dwarf, preferably with a melee weapon.

Step 3 - Wait for a siege or ambush, or just patrol around for snatchers.

Step 4 - Bury the furry bolt/arrow shields until you have a lot less cats.

Step 5 - If not working well enough, test out the new bridge catapult, and it's effectiveness at getting troops to the enemy at rapid speeds, both with the dwarf and cats at the same time. (can be used in step 3 as well).

Or, you could just give cats a low life span, and watch them die of old age every season.

[Deathworks]

Greetings!

(With a thread title like this, you knew I was coming, right :) :) :) :) :) :) )

There seem to be a few misconceptions about cats.

First of all, at least in the 2D version, they did actually help with fortress defenses. I did have a few cats who earned names in the time where cats did not get names automatically but only through kills. And the game was not modded.

Secondly, if you do not care for the kobold thief loot, allowing the cats to roam around freely is a pretty neat way to get rid of kobolds quickly - they will get spotted near the edge of the map by one of the kittens and have left the map before you know it.

I think that by and large, people are simply too scared about the FPS phantom and act pre-emptively, thus keeping cats from developing their full potential.

Deathworks

[Paul]

That only works if you have no meeting areas. If you have a meeting area the cats will swarm it and not go outside to spot enemies.

I for one like having safe meeting areas so that dwarves won't be outside when sieges come.

Plus, cats are the ONLY animal that you can lose control of. All other animals you have to assign as pets, and can freely butcher them any time when you get an overpopulation. Cats select their owners, and thus THEY select whether or not they are getting butchered.
This leads to the overpopulation and FPS woes, and the only thing the player can do is design some sort of death machine that crushes the cats in hopes of thinning them out. But doing that makes the owners unhappy, so solving a huge cat problem can be difficult if it is left uncontrolled for long enough.

I once left cats uncontrolled in a fort for a while just to see what it might do, and I had cats EVERYWHERE. FPS was down to 30 from an initial 400. I had done nothing but build a modest fort and let the cats breed, I had 10 dwarves starting, immigration was off, and I used dwarf companion to make all my characters male to prevent children. I had a legendary dining room (big room, lots of high quality tables/chairs/statues) and trying to thin out the cats still resulted in a tantrum spiral. I killed probably 50 cats over a short period, and one guy (who apparently owned a lot of them) tantrumed and killed more cats, then killed a dwarf. More dwarves tantrumed, one went berserk, several went melancholy. Soon all 10 of my dwarves were dead or crazy.

[Tormy]

They have no use apart from eating them and chaining them outside so they can yell 'THIEF, PROTECT THE HOARD!' whenever someone suspicious walks by.

You have pretty much explained why I use them as portable sentries as well as portable breakfast.

You need cats, they are nasty vermin hunters. 

[Doppel]

So, did anyone ever had a thousand cats? Ten thousand cats? Hundred thousand cats? (now its just getting silly)

[Tormy]

So, did anyone ever had a thousand cats? Ten thousand cats? Hundred thousand cats? (now its just getting silly)

I had some fortresses with huge cat population actually...but I dont know the exact numbers. Couple of hundreds I would guess.

[sphr]

Exercise control.  I do the following and it seems effective:

1) Lock up all "unused" cats.  Release only the male (ordering could take some trick, but in all of them are in the cage, the order is similar to the order in the animal list).  It's ok for male cats to take owners.  It's the female cats that needs controlling.

2) Lock up kittens in cages as soon as they are born.

3) Purge unneeded cats (esp females) by
  a) Selling (just sell the entire cage)
  b) Butchering (yields pitiful resources, but at least it gets rid of your cat problem).

Using the above three points, I can have cats, but I don't have to worry too much about it.  The only breeding that occurs is the couple of female cats that I leave out of cage on purpose.  I usually leave one female cat outside and just release another if it died to enable a little "natural" reproduction.

btw, there seems to be some animal limit in the game?  I find that breeding ceases pass a certain number of animals but quicky bounce back once I started to cull a lot of animals.

[KaelGotDwarves]

I just keep a few breeding pairs of cats and butcher the kittens as soon as others are born.

[Tormy]

btw, there seems to be some animal limit in the game?

I havent noticed it.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

Paul: My experience does not confirm your claim about meeting areas. I always build a simple meeting area underground within the first year, but I still have cats and kittens roam across the countryside far away both from dwarves and the meeting area. (I suppose they go out there to hunt outside vermin)

As for tantrumming, pet-induced tantrumming does not automatically go out of control.

During the last goblin ambush my fortress suffered, I lost quite a number of pets (including a few pet cats/kittens) and 2 dwarves. Thus far, I had two tantrums: A miner or something who toppled my conventional forge and then roughed up a woodcutter and as a consequence that woodcutter went into tantrum mode for 10 seconds but then calmed down (the miner currently has another 40 days in prison left from the 52 he was sentenced to because of his tantrum). And just to add to things, some of the pet owners even had negative thoughts about having their pets rot away because I wasn't fast enough building coffins.

Personally, I do not find your experiment convincing in many aspects:

The tantrum spiral you described was foreseeable, given the circumstances. Unless you modified all dwarves to like cats, it is likely that only 1 dwarf of these ten actually liked them. (Among my initial 7 I often have 0 dwarves who like cats, so adoption begins only after the second or third immigration wave). If that was the case, then over time all cats would adopt that one dwarf, so if you killed 50 cats, odds are that any of these cats who are pets were pets of that one dwarf. Even if you had several cat-loving dwarves, at best you would have at least 5 cats per dwarf if all had been pets - I wonder what would happen if you had a dwarf with 5 pet dogs and you killed them...

And given that you only had 10 dwarves altogether, they were probably all friends by the time things turned sour as there were very few social contacts. So, if one of them gets killed probably all would get a negative thought about that.

So, the only interesting thing I see in your experiment is the confirmation of the serious FPS drain they may cause. That is a risk there is and people need to be aware of it if they do decide to go for cats.

Deathworks