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[dragon0421]

One thing that bugs me tho is the goddamn animals. I made a point of not taking any single animal with the expeditionary team (no dogs or cats, my mistake), but the last wave of migrants brought along a shitload of tame donkeys, cows and bulls. Now I have all of them running around the fortress, shitting in the dining room and making a mess in the already overcrowded statue garden.
The problem, as far as I can figure,  is that all these animals are tamed and have an owner, so I can't order Leatherface the butcher to make chops out of them. For some reason, I also can't get to put them in cages (maybe cause they have an owner?). So I basically dont know what to do!

Have you tried butchering them and/or putting them in cages or are you just assuming you can't? The dining room of my last fort was also crowded with animals (and animal babies, about 100 total animals). As soon as I made a little ranch with rows of cages and started assigning animals to the cages, my dining room became empty.

If pets can't be assigned to cages (I haven't tested this, but I doubt it), they won't be in your dining room anyway because they'll be following their owner as they do their jobs.

I would very very much like to be able to somehow make leather out of this animal crowd, because my Mechanic-Trapper-Weaponsmith barricaded himself in the metalsmith workshop and is yelling that he wants tanned hides, and i dont have any tanned hides nor (i think) any means to get any since i only do farming and fishing and never did any hunting

DON'T just kill the animals with magma or other methods. This will create unhappy thoughts in an owner just as quickly as butchering. Go ahead and slaughter those animals.

Also, start requesting items from traders that can be used in moods. I always get a variety of leather, cloth, metals, and gems from traders ASAP even if I won't use them, just for moods.

One second noobish thing I wanted to ask you is regarding ore and stone. (Mind you, I have had a very hard time figuring out how the whole ore and smelting thing works...)
however the thing is, when I first arrived at my soon-to-be fortress, I started digging up Gneiss and Granite. Digging and digging I found stuff like microcline and other colored stone/ore (I use a tileset, cant remember which one).
Now, if I build things out of stone, for example at the mason's workshop, am I not supposed to be able to build stuff from the colored stone (like microcline), and thus building colored thrones, colored coffins and so on? Because when I try to build stone things I only get Gneiss and Granite, even tho I have tons and tons of colored stone laying around.

If you're using the version of DF from the tutorals, you should have Mike's Mayday tileset, which comes with the economic stone mod. Go into the Z menu, select stones, and turn microcline, orthoclase, etc green and put those stones near the workshop.

[Freemark]

One thing that bugs me tho is the goddamn animals. I made a point of not taking any single animal with the expeditionary team (no dogs or cats, my mistake), but the last wave of migrants brought along a shitload of tame donkeys, cows and bulls. Now I have all of them running around the fortress, shitting in the dining room and making a mess in the already overcrowded statue garden.
The problem, as far as I can figure,  is that all these animals are tamed and have an owner, so I can't order Leatherface the butcher to make chops out of them. For some reason, I also can't get to put them in cages (maybe cause they have an owner?). So I basically dont know what to do!

Have you tried butchering them and/or putting them in cages or are you just assuming you can't? The dining room of my last fort was also crowded with animals (and animal babies, about 100 total animals). As soon as I made a little ranch with rows of cages and started assigning animals to the cages, my dining room became empty.

If pets can't be assigned to cages (I haven't tested this, but I doubt it), they won't be in your dining room anyway because they'll be following their owner as they do their jobs.

well i can't set them for slaughter from the Z - Animals menu, and when I do "q" on a cage and try to "assign" an animal to it, none of the bulls and cows and so on appear on the list (sometimes a kitten or stuff like that appear)

tbh it may be that the animals are actually following their owners around, but considering that my fortress layout is not exactly a work of great architecture and considering that half of my work force spends most of the time throwing parties at the stone gardens or eating in the dining room....


* small note: I may be using "butchering" and "slaughtering" inappropriately, not sure if there is a difference, in game terms

[Rvlion]

I am not sure if it works, but if you use chains or ropes.

Assign a bedroom to the pet owner, build a chain (b -> v I believe) in that room and assign this pet to the chain.

Or simply chain all the "pets" in a big room.

Now that I mention this... I really should try this myself... 

[lodester]

If then come with migrants as pets and not livestock, the best thing IMO to do is cage them in the bedroom assigned to/taken by the owner.  This is better than chaining because chained critters still move 1 tile in any direction from the chain(see livestock below) which will steal FPS needlessly not to mention busy up the screen (boooo!), but still allows the owner to see their pet regularly.
In high-density population designs this may not be possible, but you can still cage them in either a trafficed area or out of the way.
I'm not sure if a dwarf who never sees his pet that is locked in a cage out of sight ever generates a happy thought, but if it's your best option otherwise there are lots of ways to offset that.

Livestock for butchering is the way to go IMO and keep critters from ever getting pets.
Livestock pens + 1 cage is more or less all you need. Just be diligent about caging the juvenilles (so they don't become a pet) and getting the adults in to the pen and you can easily manage any number of animals. See the Meat Industry and its many-linked-to associate wiki pages for more details.

Pens: 2x1 tile with a non-pet passable door leading to the hallway. Chain on the 'pen' tile. This prevents animal movement (fps), pet-picking, and easy organization of animals when planning slaughter seasons.
Here's a pic of a livestock stable in one of my forts. It's a young fort so it's not as nice looking as I'd like but you get the idea:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Phantom]

Wouldn't most players suggest magma?

[lodester]

Wouldn't most players suggest magma?

Isn't that most players' suggestion for everything?