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