Its a forth and back .. and each time getting closer to a good solution.

First animals were really afraid, they ran away (or hid) - if you fought them and they were wounded - they would try to flee.

That caused some problems:
Player complained that they dont see any creatures (hunters were annoyed they could not find prey) - and others found that it was hard to kill animals do to their "flee" behaviour, so most people were unhappy with the animal AI (hard to find, hard to follow a wounded animal). Their "flee" and "avoid" behaviour resulted in a huge number of animals trapped in the green mist - which was the only place safe for them.

So the system was changed so that animals dont flee so much, and be more in the open ... that worked, and players started to hunt and kill animals.

Next players complained that the animals are too easy to fight, and once some "hunter parties" were successful, that there are no animals left to kill (in the more active regions).
The reason (as explained to us) was that too many "adult female" animals had been killed and due to the low population it was hard for the remaining animals to breed.

So now there is some kind of "spawning" process that repopulates areas with animals, so that this kind of problem (no animals in a region) would not happen so fast (at least that is what i read out of some posts of Xsyon himself).

The situtation now is, that the animals do spawn (some more specific information about that would be appreciated) and they breed as well. They are also more agressive - so the players in general will have more encounters with animals - walls and buildings are more important because they protect you from aggressive animals ...

When the revenants are roaming the land, the animals agressiveness will hopefully be reduced, because the revenants will take over the "job" of making the world a dangerous place - the animals sort of have to step in until the revenants are active.

However its much more fun now than it was before the changes - a world without danger is dull (imho).

PS: For me the small/mirco bears/deers are 1) too small, 2) too aggressive 3) too hard to kill - a small bear has double my health points and deals about 60% more than i do - but i run faster :P