Anything with the word "orthogonal" in it is begging to be simplified.
To make a pump stack first you build a pump over the water source. You use that to fill a small pool. Then you build another pump above that pool, which fills a second pool. Repeat.
Yeah, your description is much better, as in, simpler than mine. I don't, however, see a problem with words like orthogonal. I'm aware of the fact that one might not know what that means, but 10 seconds with a dictionary will sort that out.
is there any way to tell your dwarves to collect the corpses of wild animals and enemies from outside but to not collect dead vermin outside ?
If by collect you mean bring to a stockpile, then you can set up your refuse stockpiles so that they don't accept vermin remains. Go to your stockpiles' settings and while leaving remains in the item types section tagged, simply deselect things like bats or rats in the corpses section.
Of course that's gonna be a lot of clicks, so if you're going to make several such stockpiles, it's preferable to set up one custom stockpile and designate the news one after its pattern.
One way of avoiding that problem altogether is not accepting any corpses at your refuse stockpiles at all. Unless you're doing something with them I'm unaware is even possible, you don't need to haul in corpses of goblins anyway. You can instead let them rot in the open and then gather their bones and skulls.
I just realized that if you've got cats (and thus, vermin corpses strewn about your fortress, then you're going to need refuse stockpiles or garbage dumps for remains anyway. Which would make the entirety of my above advice useless. If that's the case, then I hope someone here comes up with something better.