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This brings back memories of Age of Kings, which had this feature. Each animal had an amount of meat. As soon as it was killed, this amount started to decrease (the meat decayed). The workers collected the meat up to their carrying capacity (40-50 units). Then they went to the towncenter with it. The meat did not ever decay after being picked up by a worker.

This gave some interesting tactical choices for the player. To minimize loss of meat due to decay, one should send as many workers as possible to hunt an animal. But with too many workers on a single animal, they would not use their full carrying capacity. For a normal deer, it would be reasonable to use 5 workers if it was close to the towncenter, 4 at medium distance and 3 if it was very far away. The players also got a so called scout to start with (a horseman with a sword). It was used to ride around the whole map, exploring, killing lonely enemy workers (if they were in a group they were strong enough to fight back and kill the scout) and killing animals that were too far away to hunt but close to enemies (to make sure that they would not get too much to eat). It was also a useful tactic to hunt the animals close to the nearest enemies first and save the animals near the own home until later, when the enemies had developed military units and it was to dangerours to go hunting near their settlements, or the enemies had hunted those animals themselves.

It was also possible to move the whole animal closer to home while the animal was still alive. For example a deer that was shot with an arrow would jump away a few tiles (in the opposite direction of where the arrow came from). Then the second arrow would kill it. So a good tactic would be to let one hunter sneak around the deer and shoot it from behind so it would move closer to the towncenter. Then let the rest of the hunting team kill it instantly. On the other hand, elephants would move towards the hunters and attack back. After the first arrow, it would walk towards the attacker. After the second arrow, it would run furiously. Actually killing it required several more arrows. So it was advisable to have many workers when killing an elephant. Otherwise workers would die. Attacking from the direction of the towncenter towards the elephant would be a good tactic because it would make the meat carrying distance shorter. It was also possible to shoot an arrow so it would walk for a while, then run away and let the elephant calm down. Then sneak up and shoot another arrow to make it walk some more, and so on. This could save a lot of meat carrying work.

Different animals would have different sizes when they were killed, so 8 workers would fit around a killed deer (to collect meat), while 12 or 16 workers would fit around a killed elephant.

Some animals, like crocodiles and wolves gave no meet at all. And all huntable animals remained completely stationary unless a person came and shot (or otherwise scared) them. (Unlike Widelands where all animals move around randomly most of the time.)

So hunting was an important and interesting aspect of that game. A part of what made it a great game. But I do not see much possibility to integrate those interesting aspects into Widelands.