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[clockout1]

Do my dorfs lose a significant amount of happiness over dead pets? I'm undergoing a catsplosion and I need to get rid of some to lower lag.

EDIT: This might go under gameplay questions. Oops.

[Wannazzaki]

Runesmith, set the cats for slaughter.

[clockout1]

I dunno about that, I've been using a danger room I accidentally set up with menacing spikes versus training spears.

It's fairly efficient, but I'm worried about happiness when people's pets start turning up with holes in them.

[Girlinhat]

Pasture them for now, and then toss one off a cliff every season or so.  Start with the females.  The idea here is to pasture them to keep them safe (lock the door for somewhat easier pathing) and then to pasture them onto a retracting bridge and kill them one by one.  The mood impact shouldn't be hard enough to cause any problems if you do it slowly.

You can also mod cats to no longer claim an owner, but still hunt vermin.

[Varnifane]

What I've found (anecdotally) is that a given squad can handle the loss of two pets or one child per season without tantrum concern.

Although dorfs in my fortresses start out ecstatic, and I also allow for burial of pets.

[bottlesproot]

I've found that as long as you don't give your dwarfs anything else to be angry about they can almost always handle the loss of a pet. I kill all undesirables at the start of every migration wave and have had only one serious tantrum (and that dwarf was mentally frail to begin with).

Here's a simple, if exploity solution to the pet problem that I'm fond of:

1. Find or build a tall cliff. If you have a volcano, that's even better!
2. Zone it as you would a pit.
3. Set the zone as a pasture, and add in any unwanted pets you'd like to get rid of to the list.
4. Before leaving the menu, change the pasture to a pit. Pits and pastures use the same list in memory, as it turns out, and it is kept even when switching between the two.
5. Watch your dwarfs gleefully chuck their beloved pets to their deaths.

If you're lazy and want the deaths to stagger themselves, just toss them all into an empty 1x1 hole. Darwin will do the rest. Makes for great reading material too.

[nerdyboy321123]

You could do what girlinhat suggested and take away the [adopts_owner] tag in the raws... or do what i did and take it away, make them milkable, and able to make cheese out of that milk... suddenly a nuisance becomes a valuable commodity... kitteh cheese for all!

[assimilateur]

Last time I skewered some pets it was done to new migrant and in a young fortress with few luxuries. That was enough to turn them sad or even miserable in some cases, but they were able to bounce back. Now in a mature fortress with high quality prepared meals and great dining halls and whatnot, your dwarves shouldn't even flinch after losing a pet or two.

I was going to describe a simple way of killing pets with upright spike traps, but I see that this is largely obsolete thanks to the new pasturing mechanics (I haven't made a fortress in several updates).

[Ubiq]

I guess it's a side-effect of giving [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] to my dwarves, but I don't recall the last time I saw a dwarf arrive with just a cat or dog. Elk Birds seem to be the most common followed by modded animals like chiru or wood bison.

It's really nice when a group of migrants might bring a free stray tame Giant Cave Spider.

[ASCIt]

You could always isolate them completely from the dwarves, preventing adoption, then only use really pissy dwarves to move them around.

[Girlinhat]

Isolation, much like sporing, doesn't work for adoption.  Cats will adopt dwarves on the other side of the fort while being dragged to the butcher.

I'm personally enjoying the 1x1 pasture more and more.  It allows you to get some combat going!  If you do this in your dining hall with windows/wall grates then your dwarves will witness these deaths and become hardened to discomfort, making them almost tantrum-imune.

[acetech09]

I pastured them in my drowning room and got a bit of entertainment when I dropped some gobbos in there.

[acetech09]

Waaait a sec - I just realized how undwarvenly we are!

When a dwarf adopts a sheep, we kill the sheep.

When a cat adopts a dwarf, we kill the cat.

Shouldn't we kill the dwarf? I'd like to see a fort that has a population of male cats where you have to kill a dwarf if he gets adopted.

[i2amroy]

Elder:Sorry Urist, but you have been chosen. There's nothing we can do.
Urist:But why great elder?
Elder:We can not question why, we can only do as the great cat beings suggest.

[Russell.s]

Elder:Sorry Urist, but you have been chosen. There's nothing we can do.
Urist:But why great elder?
Elder:We can not question why, we can only do as the great cat beings suggest.

Elder:We can not question why, we can only do as the great cat beings suggest demand.