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[Mazonas]

Currently, the only way to scroll through a list of animals is in order of when they born/joined the fortress.  Which was fine before, but now I'm keeping significant herds of livestock, I need to be able to manage the numbers effectively.  It isn't uncommon for me to keep a herd of pigs, another of goats, a mixed flock of meat and egg birds and half a dozen dogs, as well as the odd cat and whatever pets my dwarves bring along.  Currently, if I need to cull the oldest adult generation of one flock, leaving a single breeding pair and the infants, I have to wade through this;

pig male
pig female
goat male
goat female
dog male
piglet
piglet
chick
duckling
dog male
goat kid
piglet
cat male
kitten
kitten
cavy sow
dog female
cavy boar
chick
piglet
piglet
chicken male
chicken female

It'd be great to be able to view the animals of only one type in a single list, with the ability to sort that list by gender or age/generation.  So it would look like this;

Animals
goats (5)
pigs (12)
chickens (11)
dogs (3)
cats (1)
ducks (7)>
             drake
             drake
             duck
             duck
             duck
             duckling (male)
             duckling (female)
turkeys (15)
cavy (3)

Just like the stock screen - a column down one side collating the basic types, with a section to the right where the contents of individual columns can be viewed and sorted in different ways, and assigned for butchery from that screen.

[frodo0800]

agree,toady make it happen

[Z1000000m]

Anything that makes those menus more user-friendly and organized is fine by me.

[kopout]

Oh god yes. manging live stock can get out of hand fast.

[Person]

Plus all of the dead things that pile up often ends up being longer than everything that's living. And needing dwarf therapist to tell what anyone can do. Sorting options for dwarves would be good too.

[dwarfhoplite]

oh never mind.

[simonthedwarf]

I wish DECEASED units who aren't your own dwarfs would go away faster.

[Bohandas]

I wish DECEASED units who aren't your own dwarfs would go away faster.

Better yet, they should all immediately be moved to a seperate list.

[Mazonas]

An easier way to sort the dead would be REALLY useful as well, yeah.

Now we can produce slabs to memorialise a- our own dead dwarves and b- dead, named enemies including animals, I like to make proper burial plans.  One way I do it is to have a series of rooms, with a stairwell down into a burial chamber from each room.  The coffin is in the burial chamber, the stairway don to it is floored over so the room is permanently sealed off, and an engraved slab is erected over that floor, with the room it is in turned into a memorial room for the dorf in question.  Meanwhile, memorial slabs of my enemies are erected in a social room, between the best statues and fancy cages of the best prisoners/captured beasts, with the walls engraved to show fortress history.  If a particularly awesome military dorf falls after racking up a decent kill count of named enemies, I make extra slabs for his/her enemies and erect them in his/her memorial chamber.

The problem is that after say, 4 years in a reasonably fun fortress, each time I'm beseiged I have to get out pen and paper, scroll through the announcements and manually write down the names of all the dorfs lost before setting up the engraving of their slabs, to avoid duplicates.  Enemy slabs are even worse, since I have to keep a permanent list of killed enemies and scroll through /u/ along the deceased section picking out the new dead enemies.

[Urist_McArathos]

Considering the OP, I'd like Pets to be kept in a completely seperate tab altogether.

So you might have

Animals:
  Pigs (7)
  Goats (3)
  Chickens (4)
  ...
  Pets (35).

I really wish there were other ways of dealing with pets besides just penning them away somewhere, or murdering them and hoping the owner doesn't get too upset over it.  Oh well; at least if they're in a separate list, I won't mix up some pet boar with my own herd.

[Mazonas]

See, I don't mind the pets when they're animals I'm likely to keep for livestock anyway.  If someone brings in a pet boar, I stick it in my pig herd for stud and cull the non-pet males.  I figure it gives me a permanent breeding stock base, if nothing else.  What bothers me is the dozens of bleeding guinea pigs or "cavy", and the people turning up with pet cows and horses.  The cavy are useless and in the way, and the larger animals demand too much breeding space.

Generally, I assign unwanted pets to a small underground room with no grazing, and leave them.  Most of the time the pet owners find the time to bring them food once in a while.  Of course, if the pet numbers get too large I lock the door and generally wait for them to starve.  I find setting aside a small area for pet burials helps the owners cope better.

[Zoomulator]

Not only the animals, but ALL list, should have different sorting options. It's tedious to no end to look for a name in a non-alphabetically sorted list.

All listings should have some shortcut keys to sort the list by.
Such as:
Alphabetical,
Chronological (I think is the current system),
Type wise (Profession or species),
By amount ( So you can see which items are most abundant )

I don't think the F* keys are used for much in the lists, right? Could use those, one for each sort option perhaps.
Of course, some lists are a bit different, which is typical for DF's non-coherentness, so it might be a problem in some screens&menus.

[Bohandas]

Not only the animals, but ALL list, should have different sorting options. It's tedious to no end to look for a name in a non-alphabetically sorted list.

All listings should have some shortcut keys to sort the list by.
Such as:
Alphabetical,
Chronological (I think is the current system),
Type wise (Profession or species),
By amount ( So you can see which items are most abundant )

This is a phenomenally good idea. It would also be nice to have the option to search all lists by text string like in the depot menu.

[Zoomulator]

It would also be nice to have the option to search all lists by text string like in the depot menu.

I've been thinking the same thing, but forgot to mention that. I fully agree!

[Whatsifsowhatsit]

I realize that it may be considered bad etiquette to reply to a topic as old as this, but this is just what I was meaning to suggest myself, and it seemed bad etiquette to make a new topic for something that has already been discussed before as well. I hope I chose the option the etiquette of which is slightly less bad.

So yes. I think this is what I would look forward to seeing most in Dwarf Fortress, as I always tend to keep a lot of animals, yet I don't want any one species to get too large a population (i.e. larger than 4 or so). I hope this can be looked into. I especially agree with the ideas of the OP (on the categories) and Zoomulator (on the different sorting options).