Disclaimer: some of this may not apply for chickens, but it does for sheep, pigs, goats, and cattle.

Livestock in Clanfolk are easy to manage once you understand a few things.

Dogs in Clanfolk are livestock guardians and they are very overpowered. They will kill any predator that threatens your livestock.

If your game start doesn't have dogs, then get your trading post up as soon as possible and buy a breeding pair of young adult dogs as soon as you can.

Set one of your dogs to hunt mode to help you hunt (they also make hunting much much easier), and all the rest of your dogs to guard mode. If you only have one dog, set it to guard mode.

Once the predators start to show up, you will get a lot of free meat and skins just from the predators that your dogs kill.

Put the dog beds with the livestock, not in the house.

With your dogs guarding your livestock, you can just let them free range and find grass and water.

Put a wall around your haystacks so your livestock can't get to them, that's much easier than building a big fenced area. Livestock won't bother your crops as long as there is grass available, and if they have access to the whole map there will always be grass available, except in winter when you don't have crops anyway.

Furthermore, this is realistic! Clanfolk is set in a time before enclosure, when most livestock were grazed on unfenced common land, usually on the hills, guarded by shepherds with dogs. Livestock grazing is still done that way in remote areas like Shetland. Each farm having its own fenced pastures is a much much later development.

Clanfolk really should have castration as that has been a key part of livestock management for thousands of years. But even without it, you can manage your livestock numbers by keeping to a slaughter schedule, and you should never need to slaughter a pregnant animal.

Your slaughter schedule works like this:

1. Set a target number of breeding females for each species. For sheep I usually do 7, for cattle 5, for pigs 2 (but once you have sheep and cattle up and running you'll have plenty of meat and won't need pigs; goats would depend on whether you are keeping them instead of or in addition to sheep and cattle).
   
   
2. Let your livestock breed freely.
   
   
3. When babies are born, slaughter all the adult males as long as there is one male baby of each species, otherwise keep one adult male. For sheep you can wait and slaughter them just after shearing, as long as you do it before the oldest babies become juvenile and the females can breed again.
   
   
4. When the youngest babies in a species become juvenile, slaughter excess females starting from the oldest. Some of the younger ones might be pregnant but the older ones should not be.
   
   
5. Let the juvenile males grow up and start the cycle again. This will give you plenty of meat and wool and keep your livestock numbers under control.
   
   
6. If you wind up with too many pregnant females and want to reduce, sell some of them. If you sell while they are pregnant you won't risk leaving a nursing baby without a mother.

You can ignore your livestock for the first summer.

By the first fall, get them under a roof, with beds.

Before winter starts, aim to have them in a heated building (easiest is by a vent from your main living space), with a seed trough and a water trough. You should have a good stock of grass seeds to feed them from threshing hay to make straw and seeds. I usually aim to have 500+ grass seeds and 1000+ hay going into winter and that's fine for initial small numbers of livestock. Don't feed them hay directly, that's a waste since you could be feeding seeds and also get the straw.

Don't start with cows. You won't be equipped to milk them for a while and they do you no good in the meantime, and they eat a lot.

A good start is a breeding pair of dogs, one ram and two ewes.

If you have money left, get a cat or two -- you can tame cats but having them from the beginning is helpful.