One of the worst aspects of the current system is that if you see a rare animal and can't kill it and have to let it despawn, feel really bad.
I was thinking of some kind of "population pool" for animals that is tapped from when animal spawns and returned if it despawns (from map unloading.)
This does result in some obvious issues. Killing animals is takes relatively little effort, the logistics of moving the dead animals to your base takes more effort. So people could reasonably go to other people's hunting ground, kill all their wild game, and butcher them with q1 stone axe.