In an online server, Hunting animals is not a reliable food source because of the following reasons:

1. Effective hunting of animals requires ammunition, killing them may take several shots and animals tend to move a lot when getting shot at. In an online server, ammunition is typically limited and difficult to come by when there are other players looking for them.
2. Animal spawn points may be located near Survivor Group Bases. Some player groups tend to build their base near or at animal spawn points due to the potential food supply and flat open area. When the base inhabitants see you hunting an animal or hear your gunshots, they won’t think twice about shooting you and looting your corpse, especially if their reputation isn't that good.
3. It may take a while to track down an animal which has run away from you. If you can, try to chase it as long as possible. Take note that animals can't run forever and stop after a few seconds.
4. To put it simply, you'll likely have died or died multiple times by the time you find any animals. Animals might also simply not drop any usable food and only Leather, which is essentially useless for the most part. Meat dropped by animals, especially if eaten raw, also drastically decreases your Toxicity, or the green bar on the bottom left hand corner, and it's unlikely that you'll have time to craft a Campfire if you're already starving.

In single-player, hunting animals is not a bad option and some quests require ingredients from animals.

Useful weapons and tactics:

• Rifles – Bolt-action rifles are often some of the earliest weapons players stumble across. They deal enough damage to take out animals in one headshot, but their effectiveness depends heavily on the user.
• Bows and Crossbows – Ammo can be crafted with nails and sticks, deal enough damage for single-shot headshot kills. Drawbacks include: slow rate of fire, ammo requires large amounts of space. Interestingly, even though bow weapons are silent nearby animals still flee when an animal in their close vicinity is killed.
• Vehicles — Can one-hit kill any animal, but can be difficult to use. Make you a large potential target for greedy players, and are of limited use in wooded areas.
• Shotguns – Shotguns are almost always a guaranteed single-shot kill even with body shots, but require the user to get close to the prey. Shotguns are very loud, making their use on populated servers risky. Secondary-sized shotguns make for good back-up weapons when hunting bears, wolves or other aggressive animals.
• Sneak attacks with melee weapons — If the player has invested in melee and stealth skills, you can rather easily sneak up on passive animals and kill them with one power attack to the head, provided that you have a decent melee weapon and/or sufficient perk investment.

Tips & Tricks for Hunting:

Find an area in which animals spawn:

• Washington: A common area is around the Bellevue Golf Course.
• PEI: Belfast Airport and the plains near the Confederation Bridge.
• Russia: The road from St. Petersburg to Volk Military Base.
• Hawaii: Near the Unyielding HQ, the road going to the nearest town.
• Yukon: Animals spawn near the road to the ski center near the Crashed Skycrane. Exercise caution when engaging bears or wolves, especially if you are new to the game.

Optionally, you can place traps or obstacles around the animal spawns, although placing too many buildables will reduce the spawn chance of the animals. This means that fleeing animals may run over the trap, aiding in hunting groups of animals. Another possibility is to get the animals to run into corners, making them easy pickings.

Be sure to put a decent amount of points into your Skills.

• Sharpshooter and Diving are good if you wish to use firearms when hunting, especially firearms with a scope.
• Parkour, Exercise, and Cardio are good for the pursuit of animals.
• Cooking is definitely needed in order to cook any meat you get from animals.
• Overkill may be helpful for hunting with melee weapons.