Does lava evaporate in Dwarf Fortress

In your init file, you can turn sound off by default with [SOUND:NO] or set the sound to a specific volume with [VOLUME:100] or whatever level you want. The init file can be found in the Dwarf Fortress folder under data/init/init.txt

To train exotic animals you need a dungeon master. Once you have a Dungeon Master you can tame exotic animals. Once the animal is tame you can then train it as a beast of war.

In version .31 and upwards the dungeon master has been removed. He is no longer needed to train large animals in .34, in .31 he was. But there was a bug that prevented him from showing up.