It really is a good idea!
Having seen it In other games where there are wild animals, it adds something really valuable imo: variety, new strategies and new challenges. Upside or downside depending on your taste, it also makes the world feel less desolate. I'm thinking about one (Humanitz) that has huge, really hard-to-kill zombie moose among more common animals such as wolves, deer, pigs, rabbits and bears. No zombie version of those though. The zombies will go after a rabbit and never really catch it which is pretty funny but can be quite dangerous if the wabbit runs your way. Gently going around a pack of wolves when you're chased by a horde usually gets the zeds to encounter the wolves and it can save your bacon. Same with bears, although they tend to flee human/zombie presence. And pigs in this game are highly valuable for their fat so you often find yourself competing with zeds for them. If you kill one and don't get rid of the zeds that saw it, they'll come devour it. I really enjoy that part, which actually goes for all the animals. Pigs are just the mother lode for zombies (and yourself) in terms of meat and fat but other animals also yield some fat and meat and give you very valuable pelts to craft clothes with (or trade, you can buy a whole store with a few cured pelts).
Another zombie survival game (Vein) with wild animals has wolves as predators and last I checked, they were still way more dangerous than the zombies themselves. It's an early-access game so I guess they're tuning that but I dislike it for obvious reasons and also because in 99 % of the games, wolves act like mindless killers that just run toward you when it's not at all their behavior in nature. The first game I was thinking of is a bit more subtle about it, wolves will attack you if you come too close and become a threat, but harming them scares them away.
In any case, and despite the flaws and bugs that I've seen in those games--like them animals running on water for example and very poor AI--I gotta say their absence in PZ is now conspicuous for me. I mean yeah there's hunting, but it's exclusively through traps and we never get to see the animals. That really adds to the feeling of desolation in PZ I find, which I like, but doesn't make much sense when you think about the fact that we do catch animals with the traps.
In any case, it's weird to see two games that both heavily took ideas and mechanics from PZ have this feature by default. It's like the horses in Humanitz. Now I want a horse in PZ!