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[deknegt]

What i mean of course is what are the best animals for meat production efficiency wise.

What are the best animals to either take with embarking or tame to get you an awesome food production.

I know Horses gives you lots of meat but i also want to know which one breeds the fastest and grow up the fastest.

Every d0rf likes a good piece of meat to go with their ale instead of having to combine ale with plump helmet porridge every single night.

So what animals are the most effective with filling up your stocks with meat and other useful stuff for that matter.

Cats are a pain for me personally because of the bloody CWD making my butchers emo after every slaughtered cat.

[Sphalerite]

It depends on what your goals are.  If you just want meat, don't care about the value of the meat, and are limiting yourself to the animals you can get from your home civilization, cows are probably your highest-value animal.  They give a lot of meat, and you can milk the cows for milk to make into cheese.  Cats are crap as a food animal, not only do you have the problem of them adopting dwarves, but they really don't give much meat.  Horses are decent, nearly as good as cows.  Dogs, not so valuable as a food animal, but they do at least breed quickly, and can be made into war dogs.

In the longer-term, elephants are a wonderful food animal.  They give a lot of meat/fat/bones/skin/tripe/whatever per animal, and they have a global modvalue of 5 so everything made from them is far more valuable than from other animals.  They aren't available at embark or from the dwarven civilization, so you have to either embark somewhere with wild elephants and catch them, or hope that the elves bring you a breeding pair.  And they take a long time to mature, although they do produce a lot of offspring, so it can take a while to get a breeding program up and running.

[deknegt]

Well i got enough of time as i am intent on making a long standing Fortress.

So pretty much take a breeding pair of cows on the embark and go to a Elephant Biome and try to tame a breeding pair without them horribly murdering my dwarfs whilst trying it.

Also with cats i keep 2 females in my settlement. One kitten and one Adult at all times to prevent the breeding.
It helps a lot and when female kitten grows up i basically do away with the oldest cat.

The guys can hunt as much as they can as long as the litters are being controlled. And if the male pop gets too high they always can take a nice relaxing swim in the lava tube ^^

[Patchy]

For a pure meat industry, I find dogs to be simply the most efficient. They breed fast with multiple puppies per litter, grow up quickly, give a good amount per dog butchered, and they don't adopt dwarves. And are cheap to embark with.

Cows are pretty good too, but they don't breed as fast as dogs do. So you pretty much have to milk them too to keep up with dogs. And then you have a meat and cheese industry instead of just meat. But nothing wrong with that, besides the dwarves seem to love cheese. A good bit pricier to embark with than dogs though. I like to just buy them off the first caravan, and use dogs and the free pack animals the first year.

And elephants while slow to mature, like 5 years or so for max food, give loads of high value meat. So you really only need to butcher 1 occasionally.

[rephikul]

Cows are pretty good too, but they don't breed as fast as dogs do.

Dunno why ppl have this idea, cow and dogs have the same grow rate, but cow is 20 times bigger

As for me, polar bears at cold regions , grizzly bears at temperate and elephants at tropical. I like things that can be put in the military, grow fast and sizable in meat.

[twilightdusk]

Cows are pretty good too, but they don't breed as fast as dogs do.

Dunno why ppl have this idea, cow and dogs have the same grow rate, but cow is 20 times bigger

Dogs give birth to multiple children at once, and cost less at embark per unit of meat produced (I think it works out that for the price of a cow, you could buy enough dogs to get 4/3 the amount of meat).

[Kc_spot]

how about like a more complete package... are dogs the only way to go there? 'cause I loves me a war horse..

[rephikul]

Dogs give birth to multiple children at once, and cost less at embark per unit of meat produced (I think it works out that for the price of a cow, you could buy enough dogs to get 4/3 the amount of meat).

Ya but when you hit the race cap, you want maximum return per stock. Dogs might be momentary good in the beginning but in the long run, cow definitely win out.

how about like a more complete package... are dogs the only way to go there? 'cause I loves me a war horse..

more complete package? embark on savage tropical shrubland with a breeding pair of polar bears, grizzly bears and giant eagles. Cage trap everything you see. There you go.

[Patchy]

Cows are pretty good too, but they don't breed as fast as dogs do.

Dunno why ppl have this idea, cow and dogs have the same grow rate, but cow is 20 times bigger

Cows have multiple litter rare, and they both take 2 years to be fully grown. While the cows are much larger than a dog, they barely give more meat than a dog, which seems to give way more meat than their small size would suggest.

I do agree that cows are a better source down the line as you can diversify your food supply with cheese from milking them too. But the op was asking about good sources of meat.

Though it's all going to be rather moot soon, with grazing coming next update. Will have some new factors to take into consideration for animal ranching.