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[bongotastic]

Once we have hay and can bring food to the elephants, it may become a worthwhile endeavor -- a breeding pair of elephants can produce enough meat and bone byproducts to last a long time.  For now I'm convinced that butchering them straightaway is the only way to save yourself an Elephant Tantrum.

It is in the Wiki that at the moment, there is no way to sustain an elephant because they must eat almost more often than there is clock ticks. I can't wait for forage to be a tradable commodity. I've got two water-buffaloes and they are causing their own ecological disaster... love it.

[forsaken1111]

So really to get sustainable elephants you need to slap a 0 on the end of that [GRAZER:12]

[o_O[WTFace]]

So really to get sustainable elephants you need to slap a 0 on the end of that [GRAZER:12]

I doubt you have to increase it that much.  I think people have had success with water buffalo, who have a grazer of 60. 

I think it depends on your biome though.  An embark with lots of thick grass should sustain things better, while one with rocky areas and slower regrowth will feed less creatures.

[Sphalerite]

Do wild grazers need to eat?  If they don't, then using an autobutcher device stocked with wild animals looks very useful.

[Jurph]

You've trained Sea Serpents, so that's probably trivial for you, but how would you set up an auto-butcher device?  I can see a 5Z-level  pit with a butcher's shop at the bottom, but how do you knock wild animals into it?  Cage traps, pit's-edge animal stockpiles, and pitting?  You speak of automation, so I'm imagining something with no dwarven intervention...

[Sphalerite]

You've trained Sea Serpents, so that's probably trivial for you, but how would you set up an auto-butcher device?  I can see a 5Z-level  pit with a butcher's shop at the bottom, but how do you knock wild animals into it?  Cage traps, pit's-edge animal stockpiles, and pitting?  You speak of automation, so I'm imagining something with no dwarven intervention...

Catch wild animals in a cage trap.  Get them into a confined area by any of a number of methods - build their cage next to a shallow breeding pit and designate the animal for pitting, or build their cage in the confined area then open it with a lever.

For a simple animal breeding system, all you need to do is leave male and female wild animals in a sealed room for a while.  Wait till there are more of them.  Open a door from their confined room to the outside that leads through a corridor with enough cage traps to catch them all.  Place a male and some females back in the room and kill the rest.

If you want to get ambitious, it's possible to use an elaborate system of pressure plates, floor hatches, and water logic gates to do this automatically.  Build a machine that passes the wild animal herd through a counter, diverts a fixed number of adults back to a breeding chamber, and then sends the rest to a retracting bridge over a deep pit.  I had a machine that did exactly this in my last 40d fortress.  If wild grazers don't need to eat in the current version, I might recreate the design in my next .19 fortress.