Dogs have a bad rap, I personally think they are great.

[BoogerKlown]

So I noticed that dogs seem to have a bad rap as useless. I personally have found them enjoyable and here is how I use them

Calvary and Guerrilla Tactics
A pack of dogs can split a group on insects and lead them around making it easier to defend the base early game. They can flank enemy bugs and use hit and run tactics. Insect beating on your fence, attack it with a group of dogs and take it down. I find that they work great if you have them run when they get attacked, they can outrun almost all the enemies.

Hunting Dogs
When animal migrations come thru, I build a drying rack over near the herd, then send the hounds out at night to kill the ulfen in their sleep and get like 16 ulfen in one go. Then just set them to butcher. Before I got delivery drone, I would load up the rack and then move it back to base, real easy way to hunt en mass and survivors don't need to take a break from normal work. Now that I have delivery drone, I just mark the drying rack for empty when I'm done and the fast drone will bring all goods back to base.

Breeding
They breed fast and mature fairly quickly which means that they are a decent source of leather and meat. I now have 10 dogs that I keep trained at level 5 and above, and I just slaughter all dogs once they fatten up to 100%

Feeding
Feeding is really easy since they will eat slop, just chop up some veggies, mushrooms, grain for slop and you are good to go.

Mid Game
Now that I have better automated defenses in place I don't need the dogs for defense, and mainly just use them for hunting.

Late Game Thinking
I imagine for the late game, I will keep a couple breeding just for survivor happiness, but with meat printing and broodmother carbon production, I don't think I will need them for hunting in future.

Conclusion
The dogs are a great early game addition and good up until the mid-game when they start to lose viability. Late game I see their usefulness going away as you can get better defending animals (broodmothers, nesting shriekers) that also provide resources that your survivors don't have to leave base for. Overall I think the dogs a great and have made this play through unique and fun.

[Flin Fredstone]

I like the drying rack idea

[Stimpacker]

wow, thanks for sharing. Way more uses than I thought of.

[bmnoble981]

Depends on the difficulty setting on insane for example, it can be hard to spare the time to tame and look after animals, with how frequent and large the attack waves can get, there is always a task that feels far more urgent for your survivors to handle, in early/mid game.

While on medium I usually have a herd of Ulfen or the long legged bugs fairly early on, for manure for fuel production, started using the long legged bugs more often though since I don't have to turn off the pet setting on each newborn like I have to with Ulfen.

I don't tend to hunt much in my games I focus on getting enough leather for my needs and rely on butchering the big bugs from the attack waves if my people need meat.

All that said I usually have awful luck with dogs spawns, almost always seem to be on the other side of the map away from my camps, can never seem to get them till late game.

[Paraleo]

Taming was always just flavor in this game you can simply tech out any benefits that taming might give you.
If you like playing with taming, depending on the map it might be easier to tame the local small predators than getting the 10 dog squad.
Some people finish the different scenarios in year 2,3 so what you call mid game from a time point of view is end game for others.

[flo125]

same as paraleo, i disagree what you call early and mid game. at start you need to hunt, then rack red meat, observ a dog and reseach taming. after you have to convert dogs and train them to level 5, so that you can control them. when your dogs are ready you can no more call that an "early game", so your "early game defense with dogs" has no sense...
second point: training from lvl 5 to 10 is totally useless.
but yes, dogs taming is still fun;)
I play solo games with Nova those days, on trading scena. You start with no intellect abilities (no reseach and no observation). its fun, but no way to tame, since the trade doesnt sell any informations about animals.

[Demitrious]

Good ideas, thx