[2024] Why are animals protected by claims?

Anything on a claimed deed is considered to be protected and owned by it, this is intended both by gameplay and technical design. It might not seem to make much sense for you right now, but with the upcoming Animal Husbandry you can actually own animals on your property and probably would rather not want hunters to kill them.

Originally posted by Astral: I mean if you loan someone money they have a debt but it's on them when to repay you even if they have the money.

That is working as intended as well. It is up to players to loan to people they trust to repay or create enforcement mechanisms for loan defaults with the government system. We could probably add a checkbox to automatically repay loans when finances are sufficient that the user could optionally tick off, but the vast majority of loan defaults are for missing finances, not forgetting to repay the loan.