A pride of lions
A murder of crow
A pack of wolves
Etc
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Those words dont just describe a group of animals. they describe a social group construct specific to those animals. It’s linked to both the group dynamics and general number of animals.
A pride of lions has some specific and characteristic group dynamics.
Just like a flock of birds and a pack of wolves.
Animals that have similar group dynamics often are described with a similar word.
E.g. A herd of sheep / cows / deer.
There’s also quite some examples of certain animal groups having several names, mostly depending on how many animals are in the group.
Back in history, this was usefull to quickly communicate both what kind of animals were meant AND indicating how many of them there were.
Also, sometimes the names were tied to certain specific behaviors or conditions.
E.g. A murder of crows is basically named for the general amount of crows you’d find around a carcas. Gerally just 2 – 8 crows.
But crows are also known to gather in large groups of up to a few houndred. Especially around the start of winter. Those would be refered to as a flock.
It’s pretty useful to be able to say “a herd of cows” rather than listing or counting the cows. The fact english chooses to use a different name for each is a feature not found in every language, with many opting simply for “group of X”. The usefulness linguistically of this choice is redundant information. “Group of bears” could be confused with “group of hairs”, but a “sleuth of bears” is unmistakable, preventing the listener from mishearing and then walking into a bear den and dying.
This is an example of fashionable language. In the late middle ages the French nobility who ruled England at the time started hunting for sport. And as you might imagine with a French speaking noble class and “vulgar” speaking Germanic commoners language was used very actively to show status. Not only would the nobles use French terms for animals instead of Germanic terms. So they hunted beef and venison rather then ox and deer. But they would also come up with new terms for collective nouns to sound even more posh.
Animal group names date back to medieval times when a list of collective terms for animals first appeared in The Book of Saint Albans, printed in 1486. This book, written by a nun named Juliana Barnes, covered the topics of hunting, fishing, and coats of arms, and it also included the first-ever list of collective nouns for every type of animal one could possibly imagine. Originally, these nouns were used primarily as hunting terms, but they have since extended into the everyday vernacular.
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