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[Strangething]

I think I have found a way to safely farm animals without taming them first. You have to build a structure I call a breeding pit.

Start with a short tunnel, about 8 tiles long. You need to access the end tile from above, so plan ahead and make sure there's room on the next floor up. The end of the corridor is the future animal pit, and it is closed off from the fortress by a lever-operated door or floodgate. Most of the corridor is taken up with cage traps. The other end of the tunnel is a lockable access door.

Dump mama and papa critter in their new 1x1 home. Wait for nature to take its course. Once the kids are born, you lock the outer door, and pull the switch for the inner door. The happy, feral family will run out and get caught by the traps. The ideal number of traps is the creature's maximum litter size, plus two. (Plus one if you depend on spores.) Once you have them all captured, unlock the outer door, and collect your captured animals, neatly sorted out one to a cage.

Bonus: Move the exit door over to a diagonal, and build a fortification at the end of the tunnel. This way, if a critter doesn't get trapped for some reason, you can station a crossbowdwarf at the end, and let him shoot the extraneous animal.

Bonus Two: Add a standing spear trap to the drop zone, and link it to a lever. This lets you turn your breeding pit into an execution pit with one lever pull. Make sure you keep track of which lever does what!

[Sphalerite]

Back in my last 40d fortress, I build a completely automated wild animal breeding engine.  I had a machine which used pressure plates to count a dozen adult animals of the wild animal species in question.  Those and any child animals were kept in storage cells, while excess were routed to an execution mechanism, a repeating bridge over a pit with weapon traps at the bottom.  After each counting and killing cycle the remaining animals would be routed back to the start to be counted again.

It was absurdly complicated and took a while to set up and get working properly.  I haven't bothered with this kind of thing in DF2010 because just normal animal butchering yields more animal parts than my butchers know what to do with.

[Shoku]

No good if they fly or are building destroyers.

So good for most stuff you'd want to breed wild anyway.

[Strangething]

I came up with the idea after inheriting a succession game with a huge number of caged but untamed foxes and deer.

No good if they fly or are building destroyers.

So good for most stuff you'd want to breed wild anyway.

I can't imagine trying to breed building destroyers. But now I kinda want to find out if it's possible.

[Axecleaver]

Back in my last 40d fortress, I build a completely automated wild animal breeding engine.  I had a machine which used pressure plates...
...I haven't bothered with this kind of thing in DF2010 because just normal animal butchering yields more animal parts than my butchers know what to do with.

I'd love to see how you did that. Have you considered uploading the map to DF Map Archive? Or maybe you could sketch it out with QuickFort Mapping Tool or something?