Do you plan to use a new CPT to show animals instead of WC? Allowing them to continue editing in WC and using another CPT would mean you’d need to duplicate all of the existing posts and also duplicate and/or update the related CPT every time something is added/edited/deleted. This really would be more work than just building a new site.
You could replicate most of it, but you can’t replicate the WC attributes without a lot of work. WC is special in that each “Attibuted” is a taxonomy that is created on the fly in the admin. They are basically nested taxonomies. Each “Term” in the “Attributes” is actually a custom taxonomy and attribute value is a term in the custom taxonomy.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the only way to move out of WC would be to build a new site. I imagine that whoever built this used WC to reduce the amount of work that would be needed or that they were not able to do all the custom coding that would be required.
