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[Miles_Umbrae]

How about making it into two different classes of war-training depending on if the animal is a large predator or herbivore animal, i.e. combat war-training for predators and utility war-training for large herbivore animals.

It's a mistake to think of herbivores as peaceful and predators as violent. At mating time, there's plenty of violence between the males of nearly all large mammal species. Search YouTube for "horses fight" or "stags fight" for examples.

The question is whether you can get the animal to fight on command, and that comes down to social instincts. Dogs and horses are so trainable because they're so social. Here's a video about zebras vs horses.

DF is a fantasy game, so I'm not objecting to all the exotic war animals. It's just strange that the animal historically most trained for war is not war trainable, while so many animals that have never been trained for war are war trainable.

Wasn't really talking in terms of peaceful or violent.
I was talking more in terms of naturally ferocious or prone to retreat.
If an animal is naturally ferocious, i.e. uses its "weapons" on a nearly daily basis to fight then war-training is just a matter of teaching the animal who to fight and not to fight.
While animals prone to retreat needs incentives to fight rather than retreat, whereas training them to become ridden in combat without getting spooked is more "in their nature".

Though all this does not preclude training hippos to stomp gobbos to a paste or training deer to make kobold-kabab.

[scourge728]

PTW

[Baffler]

Yeah, it wouldn't really be appropriate to train a horse as a war animal in the same way you train a dog. The methods and skills you teach a horse that's going to be used in combat as a mount are not the same. For horses the biggest thing is to overcome their natural skittishness and other instinctive behaviors, as opposed to dogs whose training is mainly to appropriately direct their natural energies. That includes physical conditioning; training them to obey and trust the humans they're working with; and generally keeping their head and not bolting, lashing out, or throwing their rider under chaotic conditions. Source. A separate "train as mount" task for the animal trainer would be better, I think.