Just a little concept I was thinking might add to the ambience:
Whenever you kill a creature in an open area, and even moreso when you butcher it, there’s a percentage chance to cause one or more scavenger animals (dog, wolf, coyote or crow) to spawn and make a beeline for the corpse, intent upon devouring some or all of it. If you stay close, the animal may fight you to get to it (well, probably not if it’s a crow).
The animal will generally eat a couple of chunks of meat and/or bones from a butchered corpse, or tear chunks from an intact corpse leaving it damaged, and then move on to standard animal behaviour.
If there was tainted meat in the corpse and the animal eats it, that animal will leave behind a “tainted corpse” when killed, and if not burned or butchered will in due course re-animate as a zombie dog or zombie bird. If butchered it will yield tainted meat.
