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[Sphalerite]

Okay I know this isn't helping anyone except me but...
Cats don't provide meat when butchered? What? I always start with 3 females and a male for that sole purpose.
Although maybe I should be trying something different...

Cats are too small to be useful as meat animals.  They're right on the border of being large enough to yield meat when butchered.  Fully adult cats usually give a few units of meat, but kittens never give anything but a skull.

[sambojin]

I've found that 2-4 sheep, a male dog and at least 5 female dogs is optimal. To tell you the truth, I usually skip the sheep entirely, just relying on dog numbers. The originals are sometimes the best. Keep the biggest/best two male dogs as they mature and slaughter the rest. Same with the sheep.

While you won't be able to shear dogs (or milk them I guess, cheese-making has never been a high priority in my fortresses) they are so much better in a cash/usefulness comparison. Even when butchering a few for some meat/leather you can't help ending up with heaps. Once you're at 48 female dogs it will virtually never go down from that, and training them as you want is very handy. A mixture of 50 wardogs and hunting dogs will take down pretty much anything your dwarves face.

Rabbits, smabbits. My wardogs will follow my commander anywhere, anytime. And I don't have to do jack all for them. They're just walking food parcels in a nice leather carry-case. With teeth. No levers needed.

[wuphonsreach]

Tricks with eggs:

1) Do not build a lot of nest boxes.  Start with a single nest box (maybe two), located in the pasture zone where the poultry are penned up.

2) Have a food stockpile next to the kitchen that takes barrels and only allows eggs.  It only needs to be a few tiles in size (2-5 tiles).  If you have "no mix" turned on under orders (strongly suggested), then allow 1 tile per type of poultry that you have.

3) Make sure your haulers are not too busy to move "food" around.  As long as there is empty room on the egg stockpile, they will collect eggs before they hatch.

The only time I get a poultry explosion is if I lock the door into the poultry pasture room or if I build too many nest boxes early on.

[Nidokoenig]

I tend to bring some dogs, turkeys, water buffalo and alpacas. Also tanks, but that's from my mod and they're more or less equivalent to buffalo. Dogs and turkeys are for bones and leather more than anything else, alpacas are for wool and cheese(I mod dogs to milkable, too, in fact), and buffalo and tanks are for meat, and milk from buffalo and shell from tanks.

For grazing, you just need to be careful about making sure all your creatures get enough pasture and aren't fighting over it. This post gives grazing values which are good enough to keep water buffalo alive for a year if you use a one animal, one pasture system, and it works well enough for me to be able to keep tanks, which produce 5-10 young a time. Grazing pathfinding can't really handle more than one or two creatures in the same pasture. You can get away with a greatly reduced pasture by arranging it in a checkerboard pattern by cutting out half the pasture, so that half the grass will be untouched and stimulate regrowth, but the number of pen/pasture large animal jobs this produces makes it only viable if you lock the milker and shearer in with the livestock so only they get distracted.

[CapnUrist]

I've been embarking with five kinds of birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese and peafowl), because they don't graze, so I can pen them in a dry stone cave, they all lay eggs which can be good for meals, and as far as I've seen they all produce a small amount of meat when butchered, though I don't have them for the meat (I tend to just butcher any stray grazing livestock as soon as it walks in the fort, but it's still a fairly vegan fortress).

[kefkakrazy]

*goes to add [TRAINABLE] to the poultry in his war wabbit fort*