Feeding animals?

[teashell]

I tried googling the answer but the answers I got seemed to be for outdated versions, so I'm not sure if that would affect anything.

Anyway, I'm having trouble feeding my dogs and baiting carnivores. Before, I could reliably let my dogs eat dead people(got rid of the body, kept the dogs quiet, win-win) and raw spoiled meat. On my current game, my dogs do occasionally eat humans, but it seems to be very spotty and not consistent? They run around their pen barking for food with a dead Njerpez at their feet. When I go off to do my own thing and come back, the body was untouched; the next day, it was "slightly eaten" and rotten.

Similarly, I have no idea what to bait traps with. I know there are foxes in the area via encounters. I set up a few paw board traps with dried meat; nothing at all.

So what should I be feeding my dogs/baiting my traps with? Is there some sort of logarithm for when dogs will eat bodies? Will they even eat rotten meat? I feel wasteful just burning the dead bodies but they don't seem to do anything.

[Privateer]

I'll try to help if I can. Dogs will eventually eat corpses but very spotty and I'm not sure of the threshold.

Raw meat in any stage of decay can feed dogs and be used as bait for carnivores. For fox I often use a small fish as bait.

Cooked/processed meats are ineffective as bait, but can be used for dogs until it spoils. Spoiled cooked foods have little value.

The inability to cut human flesh, prior to yourself being starving, limits uses for corpses. They will eventually decay to just bones
at which point the dogs will love those

[PALU]

Overlapping a fair bit with Privateer's answer...

Dogs (and the PC) only eat humans when starving, and they will be hungry for a fair while before that, so you'd have to suffer a lot of barking before it happens.

Raw and unspoiled (including stale) processed meat and fish is readily eaten by dogs, but they won't touch spoiled cooked/dried/smoked food, so that's just garbage. Other animals will not eat processed food of any kind.

Spoiled fish and meat can be used as bait, it it works poorly: fresh is considerably better.

After the dog ate the bones of my first Njerp I now keep Njerp/robber bones in piles on skerries in the rapids (the next best thing as we don't have heads on poles).

Bears eat fish and meat, and possibly berries. Some birds eat berries (birds of prey eat meat, or course), hares love turnips and other roots, and I think elks and reindeer eat turnips as well. Badgers eat just about anything. Also, you can multi-bait...

There was a threat on the old forum where various baits were discussed.

[caius]

Another observation about dogs eating dead bodies. 

If I unleash my very starving dogs while I fight a Njerpez (for example), then the starving dogs will eat the body.  However, if I then leash the dog and tie it in proximity to the dead body so the dog should be able to eat it, the dog won't eat a body while they are leashed.  The dogs won't even eat it if they are still starving and would have eaten the body if unleashed.

Grain seeds also seem to be bait for some birds.

[Roheline]

I've found that my dogs actually will eat spoiled meat, though they'll eat other non spoiled sources of food first. Sometimes if I'm away from my cabin for a while and find a rotten bird carcass in a trap when I get home, I can toss it into my dog pen and after a few days I'll find just a pile of feathers. I can also toss spoiled cuts to my leashed dogs and they'll eat that without issue.

Due to the way carcass processing works, you do need to cut the carcass of a larger animal before it's gone 'rotten' and the dogs will still eat the meat if it spoils after. Once the carcass has rotted, it's no longer considered available to process and you can only get it back for the dogs to eat if it's small enough to pick up. I wish hauling were possible on the zoomed out map, because I once had an entire reindeer herd stampede simultaneously into my trap fence and couldn't get them all processes before they rotted. Could have fed the dogs for a year!