As for animals, competition to kill them is not an issue, the problem with the sparse amount is that I have to walk around quite a bit before I see a new animal and most of the time it's birds, cats, dogs or ones that would kill me
Back on the original Origin T2A shards, I used to spend a lot of time in Moonglow training fighting skills on animals and picking cotton. Here though, it seems there are significally fewer animals around Moonglow (I specifically remember an area near the cotton fields that always had plenty of hinds...