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[Viprince]

Now, for the most part this is doable and not difficult. The problem is whether or not I'm actually right about the "babies spawn adjacent to their mother" thing. I've heard many stories of dwarven mothers giving birth while next to a precipice and the infant immediately dying, but I don't know if this is a certain thing.

Tried this too.  It doesn't work.  Newborn animals appear on the same tile as their mother.  I think what's going on with dwarves is that dwarven babies have no survival instincts whatsoever and can craw right off the precipice before their mothers are able to pick them up.  Newborn animals don't do this.

For an automatic butchering system you need a way to physically contain the parents while luring their offspring onto a retracting hatch or bridge.  You can use chains as suggested here, but babies stay near their parents until they grow up.  In the auto-butchering engine in my current fortress I use a system where animals are constantly being cycled in and out of isolation cells.  Each cell is a single pressure plate set to only trigger for an adult of the species in question.  Before and after the plate are hatches linked to the pressure plate.  Babies follow a few tiles behind their parents, and floor hatches have zero delay on opening, so when the mother animal steps on the plate both hatches open.  This traps the mother in place and separates it from any babies following it, and possibly drops a baby down to whatever is under the hatch.  In my design that is just a floor one level down with a stair back up to the entrance to the sorting mechanism, but it could just as well be a ten level drop to a meeting area.

Mother animals will eventually give birth again, so you need a way to get them out of the isolation cell and back through the sorting system.  My design uses water logic to implement an AND gate which detects when all the cells are full, and then opens a side gate to let any excess animals out into a butchering mechanism.  Alternate paths also open allowing animals out of the cells into a waiting area, where they are briefly stored before being let back into the sorting cells.

I like how this uses pressure plates which only the parents activate to ensure the babies don;t cause the death of their mother and isolates the mom from the baby, establishing control of their pathing.

I'd have to actually see your design to understand it (seems complicated I don;t really get the water logic's involvement and waiting area etc.) but I am not seeing what's causing the mother's to path to that pressure plate alone. Wouldn;t the rest of the waiting area population try to go for that exit as well? Whihc would cause other breeders to get mixed with the babies and or fall and be butchered.

I like the idea though.

[Sphalerite]

I'd have to actually see your design to understand it (seems complicated I don;t really get the water logic's involvement and waiting area etc.) but I am not seeing what's causing the mother's to path to that pressure plate alone. Wouldn;t the rest of the waiting area population try to go for that exit as well? Whihc would cause other breeders to get mixed with the babies and or fall and be butchered.

I'm going to have to do a proper writeup with diagrams on the system soon.  The basic idea is to take advantage of the innate behavior of all wild animals to eventually leave the map.  You have a starting point that divides into a dozen or so paths, each leading to an exit to the system, and each interrupted by a pressure plate with hatches before and after it.  Animals start off at the beginning of the system, and all start wandering towards the nearest exit.  Animals don't all move at exactly the same time, and don't always walk straight towards the exit, there's a lot of randomness in their movement.  When the first animal reaches a pressure plate it opens hatches before and after the plate, which traps it on that spot and blocks the path to other animals.  If there was an animal standing exactly on the hatch when it opens, that animal will fall to whatever is under the hatch, which in my design is simply a path back to the start of the machine.  The other animals in the system will find that path now blocked by the open hatches, and will instead attempt to walk to the next nearest exit.  Repeat until all pressure plates have animals on them, and all exits are blocked.  Now you have however many adult animals as you have pressure plates trapped in the system, and your remaining adults and babies can be diverted off into a slaughtering machine made from a repeating bridge over a pit or something similar.