Following the post earlier regarding animals being hard to find and when you do find they are bugged.
I would suggest the devs have a look at a game called thehunter, its free, but they use quite a cool method to track animals with footprints/droppings etc which point you in the area they have been or are currently in.
Ignore the fact they use GPS and a rifle (which has no relevant to this game) its mainly the method of tracking which i think would be quite cool for this game. It would almost turn hunting into a mini game.
I have no idea how hard this sort of thing is to code but its worth a look
Even the Roma Victor method of tracking would be good here. Actually I say that as if it was a bad thing actually I liked the system.
Basically the game would tell you what direction the animal was heading or if you had lost the trail. It was quite cool. Especially in with no compass so that you would have to use the landscape to direct yourself.
Surely we could easily get this code into the game.