is this mod require a new game

No.

Well I have a pretty big issue... Crash-to-Desktop shortly after starting a new game. Right as soon as the capsules open (I'm guessing that's when pets spawn). No error popups. No log entries indicating why (the most frustrating part!). I don't know if this is related, but I recently switched from W7 to Linux Mint. And I've been having to use the painful process of elimination method ever since. I wonder if others out there are having the same issue and not being able to find out why.

But I tried this with only Core, and that doesn't happen. It does happen in combination with other mods.
The other (remotely animal related) mods would be
Animal Gear
Animal Gear basic
Horses
Animal Gear Horse
Animal Tab
Animal Logic
Foxes aren't suicidal
Giddy-up (all of them)
And your mod loaded dead last. If you want the full list exported from mod manager, let me know.

I would probably guess Animal Logic as the most likely incompatibility. I hope it can be found and fixed, because your mod looks to be pretty useful.

Animal Logic is my permanently-in-use mod, so that's not it. It would suck if that's a paltform issue, because no way I can help you with this.

When using the Colony Manager mod, it thinks that grass is about to be harvested in the foraging tab. I'm not sure why that is. Also I was using this with the growable grass mod, and I think there's a conflict between the two as herbivores on the map are still going through the grass like crazy.

Yeah, encountered that myself. That's because manager searches for everything that has yield. New grass has yield, but it's unharvestable according to new rules. But colony manager doesn't know that. I think I need to add a special compitability patch for colony manager to show it that not everything with yield is harvestable.

Originally posted by bearhiderug:

Anyway to workaround and stil not have it give yield? Or is it conditional for the mod to work?

Just unselect it from a list :|

Colony Manager should be fine now.

Since the update, animals can barely eat grass fast enough on my game, everything from cattle to Thrumbos is just about starving and eating the map bare, whereas everything worked fine for the previous 5 in game years. Thanks for the work on the mod, hope it can be fixed.

That's... weird. "Fast enough"? What does it mean? Do they eat slower now?
Only thing I could find is on average previous variant had 0.05 more nutrition per patch of grass, it's 25% overall reduction in current version. It was due to my miscalculation/overgeneralization, in another words it was a bug and wasn't intended.
As I can see, quite a bit of people would like to increase nutrition value of a grass, so probably I should add an option or something. I think I can add value multiplier.

Am I right in assuming that this mod makes the game easier as animals will have more food to eat?

Originally posted by 5ink4r:

Am I right in assuming that this mod makes the game easier as animals will have more food to eat?

Yes

Thank you. Nevertheless, your mod sounds like it's more immersive. Any way to configure it according to vanilla behaviour?

Originally posted by 5ink4r:

Thank you. Nevertheless, your mod sounds like it's more immersive. Any way to configure it according to vanilla behaviour?

It uses vanilla values by default. You can make it more impactful in settings if you wish.

Apparently people are having problems with this and alpha biome since this is causing plants to not grow naturally in the new biome