Elijeh has made a good point about hunting gazelles. Kill all the gazelles in a herd first so they don't get the chance to spread out. This hunting strategy works best in no or low lag games. In high lag games it is hard to control the villagers and they tend to start harvesting the first gazelle killed before the order to kill the other gazelles takes effect. Allowing the herd to spread out more. Yes gazelles are a good food source. Shore fishing is faster then hunting however. I think the rates for gathering are as follows: .60 for shorefish, .45 for hunting, .40 for both berry picking and fishing with boats or ships. Thanks Emowilli and Thorfinn for the data from your posts. This data is also available on several websites and in the forums here of course. I can only remember that Blackdouglas has compiled this data but his site has merged with another site. I think it can now be found at Telcontar's site. Did Telconatar have his own tables for this or was that someone else? Well someone else also has tables that can be downloaded. Check the links at AOE Heavan and at the MSN Zone.
Hunting is faster then berry picking but some food does decay. Actually quite a bit of food decays from gazelles. I have heard that elephants decay at a slower rate and my own obervations agree with this though I have not taken the time to quantify the decay rate of elephants. Depending on how many villagers you have harvesting an individual gazelle the food that will be harvested can vary greatly. Even if there are 15 villagers on one gazelle with a storage pit 3 or 4 tiles away about 20-25 food units are still lost. I have found that harvesting an entire herd at one time with say about 10 villagers means if I put two villagers on each deer I will loose about 50-100 food units of each deer. The distance between the gazelle and the storage pit is the second most important variable in how much food is harvested from any one gazelle. The most important factor being how many villagers are harvesting each gazelle. So it is better to use 10-15 villagers on a single gazelle in the interest of efficiency. However the other gazelles get scattered in the process of hunting so there is a limit to the efficiency gained. Using the maximum number of villagers needed or 15 villagers per gazelle means distance is not a factor in the decay process. However this means the other gazelles in the herd are scattered over a larger area then if I had simply killed the herd outright. This will cause the collection time of the food to be increased while the food is being transported to the pit. Please note 15 villagers can not fit around one gazelle at the same time. Also decay occurs even while villagers are harvesting food from the gazelle. This means some food will always be lost.
So what balance should I strike between food decay and increased time to collect the food? I'll start with a number of assumptions: 1, I want to harvest the gazelles as my FIRST food source. ;2, I am working from a start with 3 villagers and low resources (150 food). Without using statistics and working from experience I will attempt to explain my theory. After having built two house I build a storage pit next to one herd of gazelles and a forest. I place the pit as close to the forest as possible which might mean some gazelles are scattered in the process. To minimize scattering I try to place the storate pit off to the side of the herd. Now I have five villagers and another two being created. Next I try to choose one gazelle at the herd edge to minimize the scattering of the herd. If the herd is densely packed I will kill two or three gazelles to harvest. I don't kill all the gazelles in the herd outright. I do this to avoid loss of food to decay. Yes the gazelles will scatter, sometimes a long way. I place at least one villager on each gazalle if I have killed more then one. After having finished harvesting the first gazelles killed I take my villagers who now number between 7-10 and hunt the other gazelles. I will look for one gazelle I can kill without scattering the remainder of the herd. At this point I may have one or two villagers on wood. All of my hunters I place on that one gazelle. Next I hunt any individual gazelles. If there are two or three grouped gazelles and they more then 3-5 tiles from the storage pit I will harvest the group of gazelles. If they are still close I will harvest one or two only. I will continue with this process of harvesting as few gazelles at one time as possible to avoid scattering the remainder. Sometimes a gazelle can run very far away. In this case I will simply ignore that gazelle if I have found a better food source or have built a granary already.
Please note that a number of different variables can improve or degrade the effectiveness of this strategy. Gazelles can get boxed in between the pit and the town center in which case when they run they stop near the town center. In this case spend more time gathering from one gazelle. If the gazelles start scattering into the edges of a forest they might be reachable with only one villager at a time, something to be avoided as this greatly increases the loss of food to decay.