The implementation of animal people on the surface of savage biomes is a missed opportunity for some fun when they're unarmed and pretty dumb too. If they had something like a wooden mace, blowgun, or even just some sharp stones, they would become capable of being a threat to civilians. Of course, just like the Sub-T animal people, a good military would be able to dispose of them. Still, any sentient creatures (without some sort of effective natural weapon) should at least have basic weapons if they're going to survive (especially with the GIANT creatures). It just seems unnecessary and unrealistic for them to be existing otherwise.
Another problem is that since you can't eat the animal people due to them being sentient and they keep out all the non-sentient creatures, you are forced to waste time chasing them with your axedwarves. I would propose, in savage biomes, having both a wild sentient spawn rate, and a non-sentient spawn rate. This would ascertain the possibility of the animal people spawning alongside the animals rather then replacing them.
My last improvement would be to make them hunt the creatures using their weapons, specifically rock spears and blowguns, and then drag away felled quarry out of the map, with both the meat and the people despawning. Dwarven hunters or other animal people could try to forcefully steal the meat, resulting in conflict. (This could be togglable for dwarves.) They could also help the animal people kill the quarry, and either share the meat or just be greedy and try to take it for themselves. The behavior could be applied to Sub-T animal people too (preferably if they were made to make rock spears). This would make the savage biomes a bit more lively and create competition between dwarves and animal people to gather quarry.
These 3 things would turn overworld animal people from a waste of space and training dummies to competition in hunting, potential threats to civilians, and much more interesting creatures in general.