Well, animals are more organic and flowing and you'd have much of the torso done with a 8vert cylinder. All you have to do then is to move the vertices in place. And yes, it results in a clean topology or what I would call a organic geometry But do what you find easier and better I think I may be able to keep it below 1000. Well, my theory, when modeling the lion and the zebra etc. was that because they would be less of them on screen they could afford to have a lot of tris