40d:Pet

Tame Animals can be adopted as pets by dwarves. On the animals screen z-Animals, you can mark each animal as Available/Unavailable by selecting it and pressing Enter. Available large animals may be adopted by any dwarf, but tame vermin will only be adopted by dwarves who like that animal. Unavailable animals are treated as livestock, and you can ready them for slaughter at the same screen. Once an animal has been adopted as a pet, it will be given a name, and can no longer be slaughtered.

Cats are shown as "Uninterested", because cats choose their owners. All cats will eventually adopt a dwarf if not slaughtered for +Kitten Tallow Biscuits+.

Dogs can be trained at the kennel. Trained dogs can be assigned to specific dwarves via that dwarf's preference menu.

Immigrants often arrive with pet animals, even if they are livestock animals such as horses. If those pets breed, the young animals won't be pets.

Advantages/Disadvantages

• Unhappy dwarves can be "comforted by a pet" and become happier
• The pet will follow their owner everywhere - this means they cannot be caged or chained
• Death of a pet makes its owner unhappy, though less so than death of a friend or family member.
• Dead pets should be buried in a coffin, or the owner will be more upset.
• Pets can't be eaten unless the owner is dead (the animal keeps its name but is no longer a pet)

Effects on Performance

Depending on the computer, having a lot of pets can make an impact on FPS. In this user's tests, a 100 dwarf fortress with wide open hallways for easy pathing was getting about 70 FPS average, with twenty pets. I used death hallways to kill fifteen of the pets (kept a few cats for vermin duty), and now get about 80 fps average. This seems like a huge jump, and no other fortress changes could be found to explain it.