In the rapidly advancing field of computer vision, object detection has become crucial for various applications, including animal tracking, face detection, and surveillance systems. This study investigates the efficacy of contemporary object detection methodologies by evaluating the performance of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) models and TensorFlow Model Zoo architectures for animal tracking. YOLO models, known for their ability to process entire images in real-time and predict bounding boxes and class probabilities simultaneously, offer significant advantages over traditional methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Fast R-CNNs. This paper compares the performance of YOLOv5 and YOLOv7, alongside TensorFlow-based models like Faster R-CNN ResNetv152 and SSD ResNet101, using a dataset of animal images. Our findings reveal that YOLOv5 outperforms other models with a mean average precision (mAP) of 9 7.5%, demonstrating superior accuracy and efficiency in object detection tasks. YOLOv7 also shows strong performance with an mAP of 96.7%, while TensorFlow Model Zoo’s Faster R-CNN and SSD models lag behind with mAPs of 81.9% and 81.6%, respectively. The results highlight the significant advancements in deep learning and object detection algorithms, particularly the advantages of YOLO’s architecture in handling complex detection tasks in real-world scenarios.