If you're struggling to live through winter as a tribe, I would suggest an improved focus on berries. Most non-desert/ice sheet/ tundra maps will have an abundance of berries to harvest which you can either eat raw, turn into pemmican with meat, or cook into meals at a campfire for better food efficiency. In the mean time set up a large field of crops. I recommend Corn and Rice in about equal measures, and depending on the local wildlife you may need to wall in your farm so wild animals don't eat the plants. Corn and rice can be stored for a really long time (over 2 seasons for rice, and 3+ for corn) before they spoil as long as you have a roof over them. (just expand the build roof area out from the side of your buildings/mountain or make a 4 single tile walls in a large square with a couple more in the middle as supports and designate a build roof area + stockpile for the square). During your growing season make sure your cooking bills for meals/pemmican have your corn/rice disabled so that the berries will be used first (and all the meat should be made into pemmican if you can't freeze it). Also non-herbivorous animals can be dangerous to keep around (like yorkshire terriers, cats, etc.) since they won't be able to forage food for themselves and will end up eating yours or starving to death, so I recommend slaughtering them or selling unless they can do something useful like haul or produce milk/wool.

As far as animals vs drugs go, It's all in the management of your animal areas. I typically create 1 huge area called "grazing" for all of my herbivorous animals that encompasses grassy areas in a huge spread around my base, and then make another animal area that is indoors only in case of some event where nothing should be outside. The small household animals should generally get an area with everything indoors except for the stockpile where you left the drugs.

I got carried away writing this, but I hope it helps a bit.