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[BaneOfKree]

This has probably already been posted about, so apologies if this is old ground.

I was wondering whether a Vetenary Skill could be added to the Trapping Labour to offset;

 a) some of the negative emotions caused when a megabeast mutilates your mayor's prize cat and resulting tantrum spiral/FUN and
 b) to give you the option to spay/neuter owned/stray pets in order to stop the infinitely tedious business of assigning animals to cages or trawling through the creature list to mark them for slaughter.

Obviously this suggestion isn't really that fleshed out, and certainly isn't core to the development of the game, but could be useful/entertaining to set one of your idle Animal Trainers to spay 100 cats.




-Bane

[Mckee]

Honestly, the idea is pretty functional as is. Give animal care a use, via allowing them to operate on animals and add an extra option to the animal menu, say 'f' for fix along with the slaughter options and whatever else. Let you do this via the 'v' menu so you can also pick a specific animal incase you can't tell via the menu.

One option for the vet is putting down badly injured animals. This is mainly for pets and it slightly ofsets the bad thought from loosing a pet. The net result will still be a negative thought, but not quite as bad as watching poor little fluffykins bleed out whilst stumbling round the meeting place.

[BaneOfKree]

Yeah, there is few things more distressing to your dwarves than a horribly injured animal running around. I accidentally/on purpose tested a spike trap on one of my dwarf's pets, and among the usual "right foreleg is cut open", "stomach is bruised", "tail is broken" messages after the trap failed to kill it outright, there was a pathetic "her heart is broken" message. The "heart broken" dog then limped around making everyone miserable before dying of infection right next to the well.

A form of 'doggy euthanasia' that doesn't involve convoluted traps certainly would ease the burden on your fortress, and stop all those animal trainers/carers idling all the time.


-B

[harborpirate]

Honestly, the idea is pretty functional as is. Give animal care a use, via allowing them to operate on animals and add an extra option to the animal menu, say 'f' for fix along with the slaughter options and whatever else. Let you do this via the 'v' menu so you can also pick a specific animal incase you can't tell via the menu.

One option for the vet is putting down badly injured animals. This is mainly for pets and it slightly ofsets the bad thought from loosing a pet. The net result will still be a negative thought, but not quite as bad as watching poor little fluffykins bleed out whilst stumbling round the meeting place.

I don't really have much to add other than I would heartily support the above modified version of this suggestion.

[SquidDNA]

Sorry for the bump here but I want to throw in my support for this idea.

Not only would a veterinary skill (special hospital area with cages, toys allocated to containers?) help save pets and make dwarves happy, as well as contain catsplosions (although elective surgery would probably take some amount of work), as suggested here, but animal healthcare skills should give bonuses to dwarf healthcare skills. Spaying and neutering 50 cats should provide some amount of experience when it comes to fixing a ruptured spleen, etc.

[ZebioLizard2]

There is about nearly sixteen different reasons why veterenatarians are not on the same level as doctors, there's a reason both have very specific learning experiences in real life! Spaying a cat is not going to teach you how to do surgery...Would make for an interesting image though

Urist Mcvettor: Don't worry! I've neutered thousands of cats! Now lets fix that brain!

[ISGC]

I just had a dog who distracted an ogre loose in my fort long enough for my dwarves to kill it die of an infection after a month of dragging his bloody carcass around my legendary dining room.
it would have been nice if I could have patched him up and put him back in service.

[G-Flex]

Spaying a cat is not going to teach you how to do surgery

Spaying a cat is invasive surgery. You're removing internal organs.

[Owlbread]

There is actually a profession specifically for healing animals known as Animal Caretaker. However, looking at the wiki, this seems to suffer from a bug that renders the profession absolutely useless. In other words, animals will only heal by themselves.

[Rowanas]

I think medical dwarves should be necessary for pretty much everything that goes on with the life of your fortress.

Giving birth? Call in the doctors.
Animal giving birth? Call in the doctors.
Animal set for butchering? Have a trained medical professional decide whether the victim has any horrendous diseases first.

As it is, medical dwarves have almost nothing to do. I expected my training programme to turn up a couple of injuries every month, but now that dwarves just tap each other, I've stopped bringing a medical professional with me on embark.

[jei]

I think medical dwarves should be necessary for pretty much everything that goes on with the life of your fortress.

Giving birth? Call in the doctors.
Animal giving birth? Call in the doctors.
Animal set for butchering? Have a trained medical professional decide whether the victim has any horrendous diseases first.

As it is, medical dwarves have almost nothing to do. I expected my training programme to turn up a couple of injuries every month, but now that dwarves just tap each other, I've stopped bringing a medical professional with me on embark.

I want a coroner to tell me who dunnit and how on all deaths. That should mean more work for medical dorfs.

[ZebioLizard2]

Spaying a cat is not going to teach you how to do surgery

Spaying a cat is invasive surgery. You're removing internal organs.

Different form of surgery, unless somehow the reproductive organs now constitute vital functions some as thinking, breathing, and pumping blood...Which is vastly different from cat to person as well.

[thijser]

Most types of surgery are not stronly releated. For example how does helping a dwarf with his/her broken finger help with a diffrend dwarf with a damaged internal organs?

[DDR]

Yes... after neutering enough cats, dogs, bulls, etc., I think you'd be quite able to neuter a dwarf with ease. Or human, at that... I think the main difference between doctors and vets is the number of species they operate on. In DF, since doctors presumably operate on any civilisation race, this line would be further blurred.

[Wyrm]

Unless dwarves have some conception of the Germ Theory of disease (microorganisms weren't even discovered until the 18th century), invasive surgeries are going to be infection-prone and will kill you as soon as save you. Also, without anesthetic to dull pain and relax muscles (19th century, although synthesis of ether goes back to at least the 16th, and maybe as early as 13th — all you need is ethenol {booze} and sulfuric acid {known since antiquity}), you're going to go into shock. This will be as true for pets as it would for dorfs.