In response to the Cattle Roster menu added in this update, I wanted to point out a few basic but glaring flaws that, at best make this feature completely unusuable for what it was intended for (managing any decent sized herd of animals), and at worst just add a frustrating, exhausting and confusing chore to the list for people that want to make use of it.
A). The key aspects of it that make it broken/unusuable for its intended purpose:
1. The animals have to be memorized one by one (and you have to physically walk up to them, too).
2. The animals that are slaughtered/moved elsewhere aren't removed from the list (and dont reflect said situations in the list, unless you click on them individually and get a message informing you of this.)
3. The animals that are born/added into your herd aren't added to the list automatically.
In order to show why said points are an issue, consider the following hyphothetical (but realistic) scenario:
1. Player A has around 50 animals (a rather low number by the average endgame player's standards, mind you), and he wants to make use of the feature so he doesn't have to spend hours inspecting each one of his animals individually. He also lives with Players B and C, which both share access to the animals in question.
2. Player A memorizes all of the animals, kills off a few lower quality males and goes happily on with his gameplay.
3. A few days pass by, player A decides it is time to cull off the lower quality animals, except he now realizes he needs to (making sure not to miss a single animal!), right click every animal in his pens to make sure none have been added/have been born/have been moved into them which he currently doesn't have memoed, which would all lead him to making wrong decisions when killing off stuff/assuming everything is in order.
4. More time passes (lets say a week), and player A decides it is time to once again cull off the lower quality animals. Except, unbeknownst to him, players B and C have been slaughtering/removing/adding animals to said pens. Quickly, his carefully managed "Cattle Roster" has turned into a cattle fuck nightmare that he constantly has to feverishly log in daily to manage, to make sure it stays up to date and reflects correct information. Add on top of that, that he now has to carefully remember each time he slaughters an animal to both locate it in the list and remove it himself from it in order to not introduce errors or wrong/outdated information to it.
B). Suggested solutions that would turn the feature from a management nightmare to a nice QoL feature:
Honestly, there's many strange bandaids that could be applied to how it currently works, but all of them would likely not solve the problems I mentioned. Instead, I suggest that:
1. The list is removed from the adventure menu, and reworked into a user-defineable zone very similar to land surveys, without the 31x31 tile size limitation those currently have. There's no need for anyone to keep a global list of memoed animals as if they were kinned hearthlings anyway, and arguably global lists don't make sense/are confusing if you manage animals in more than one place in the world.
2. Said defined zone would then require you to place an object of some sort (lets say a billboard/book on a pedestal/what have you), from which you could access the animal management menu, which would stay open as long as you stay within reasonable distance of the zone itself.
3. Any animal currently standing within the zone is viewable from the menu, thus any newborns are also automagically added into it, and any animals that are slaughtered or dragged off the zone are also automagically removed. No headaches!
C). "Would-be-nice"s or optional things that would make this feature even more helpful and QoL:
Just make the flower menu options on animals usable from a distance as long as the person using it keeps the menu open. There's 0 reason to require players to clumsily bump their way around their herds in order to slaughter/castrate them. None of the "shoo away" or "whistle to call the animal to you" features have made this aspect of keeping animals tolerable. It's certainly better now, but still a nuisance nonetheless when you have to wait or hearth out when your animals decide to box you in randomly.
Alternatively, if ending your animal's lives from a distance is deemed too unreasonable, being able to "mark" animals in some noticeable fashion (by applying a recolour to them or any sort of indicator, a coloured collar, etc) would be very helpful when actually carrying out the slaughtering process.
And as a final thing, being able to see your animals' names while having the menu open would be helpful, so you can actually identify without having to click on it in the list where it is.