@AccordionBruce You give some interesting insights. I had not seen the page you referenced on criteria before.
Indeed it is a very good criteria to exclude branding. I am happy Facebook and Twitter do not qualify. OTOH, a wilebeest is an animal that happens to be a mascot. Probably every animal already included is the mascot of some team/brand/concept. If denying wildebeest were valid on that basis, then that same basis would serve to eliminate the penguin.
I think wildebeest satisfies a lot of the positive criteria they look for.
OTOH, I had not noticed the water buffalo before, which is more similar in appearance than the ram that I had been trying to repurpose. So I guess I will just run with the water buffalo and move on. Probably not worth the effort to submit a proposal for wildebeest.
BTW, your mention of disembodied heads may be off the mark because applications seem to have the creative freedom to represent the object however they want. If you paste an unicode char in different browsers on different platforms and in terminals, you will sometimes see dramatic variation. The penguin and bird in your post was not disembodied in my browser, but the moose head is.