About restoring the hero bonus vs animals:
How many people here played Set competively pre-1.03? The hero bonus was the bane to Set, and it was what kept him down. The pop costs were no biggies, just build a couple extra houses in archaic, but that fact that heros could wipe out animals as easily as they could made it pointless to use animals. When I played Set pre-1.03, I didn't even bother converting animals cause they died so quick, I capatilized purely on Set's god choices (which I liked) and his slinger bonus. And its not because people didn't know how to play Set, even Iron said (or maybe it was Swinger) that it was near impossible to get into the 1900's with Set, no matter what combinations of strats they chose.
Now a better solution would be to:
Lower all animals attack
Slightly raise favor cost for aggresive animals (I'd do monkeys 6 favor, hyenas 8, crocs 10, and rhinos 18)
Further lower the stats of food-giving convertable animals (all animals except wolves, hyenas, lions, crocs) and food summonables, but increase their food output.
Lower the conversion time for weaker animals (deer, etc.) and raise it for stronger animals (rhinos, eles, etc.)
This weakens Set's overpowered military use of animals, and strengthens his underpowered economic use of animals (seriously, have you ever seen any one eat their animals), forcing players to decide whether to use their favor/conversion time on free food or a free army. And, since animals are weaker and more expensive, he cannot rely totally on them and his slingers to protect him while he FHs, forcing him to expend food and slow herioc time. This adds more variety to the civ, as opposed to other ideas, will solely are concentrated at the current problem, and also builds the civ in the direction ES intended it to go (Greg Street said that they expected people to use a steady flow of favor for free, fast, but incredibily micro-intensive food.).