For an individual or small group perhaps, but if you have a situation where your group can eat the meat of most of a large animal before it goes bad it might be

For an individual or small group perhaps, but if you have a situation where your group can eat the meat of most of a large animal before it goes bad it might be efficient. An animal can have a lot of calories. To give an idea of how much, when I was a kid my father once accepted as pay for a job a butchered cow. He put it in a freezer and it took our family of 3 around a year to finish it. Ancient people didn't have freezers, so it would not be worth it for a small group to hunt and kill a large animal unless it was very easy, because they would only get a few days food out of it before it spoiled. This is assuming they have other food sources, of course. A larger group, say a village with a hundred or so people, would be able to finish eating a large animal before it spoiled. For them it could easily be worth it to send out a hunting party every few days even if that party has to do a lot of work.