How do you move caged beasts in Dwarf Fortress?

Question

I've got a fortress that's grown up past its adolescent phase and is starting to mature. Naturally, I've had a number of encounters with goblins and werewolves. Since my primary defense is a hallway full of cage traps, I now have several dozen goblins chilling out in cages in my animal stockpile room. Although ostensibly I could keep them there forever, I'd much rather do something productive with them like establish a petting zoo, hold war-crimes trials, or start a goblin aquatics program. The problem is that every time I try to move the goblins and/or their cages from their current place in the stockpile, the goblin breaks free and runs about my fortress causing all kinds of havoc.

So: how do you successfully move a caged goblin? Either to another animal stockpile, a built cage, or to release them safely into a sealed room?

Answer 1

To safely release the goblin where you want it.

Build the cage, using build, caje, expand (to show all cages and their contents), and build the cage where you want it.

You can then connect a lever to the cage (query the lever, add a task to connect to the cage, and use that to release the caged creature (goblin or otherwise) by pulling the lever (add a task to Pull).

You can also use the take from stockpile command to move them to another stockpile.

Answer 2

You can dig out a room with a hole in the ceiling, designate that hole as a Pit zone, and assign the goblins to that pit. Your dwarves will throw them into that hole. I've found that thieves have a pretty good chance of escaping, but the others won't.

I have it set up so they fall 10 Z-levels into a small room, where I can decide to either send in my military for a little practice, or pull a lever and smash them with a bridge.

You can, supposedly, designate (d-b-d) the cages for discarding, claim (d-b-c) the same zone, then manually (k) undiscard the cages themselves to order the dwarves to take the goblins stuff and discard it into a garbage zone. I've had trouble with this, but that may be because my goblin stockpiles are in a very out-of-the-way portion of my fortress and I have many other discard jobs running.