Cats and dogs interacting with cottageliving animals

I saw my kitten hiss at my chicken

Not an interaction, but I started a new Cottage Living game (because even though I had several families I thought I had ready to move in to HOB, turns out none of the available houses were big enough for my families, or cost more than they had, and I didn't want to run the aesthetics of the place by throwing up a cheap house in the one empty lot.

So I started a new game and moved a new sim into Cordelia's cottage. After a week or so, she went out for dinner during Night On The Town, to score a free meal at a restaurant rather than use the food in her fridge. There, she started flirting with one of the waiters and shortly thereafter they moved in together.

Thing is, despite living in Newcrest (he's one of my custom-made sims for my save), he had somehow adopted one of the elderly foxes that came around my lot. Out of curiosity, when he moved in, I said to move in the fox as well. I got a dog food bowl and a sleeping pad. My sims have an option to fill the bowl and call the fox to dinner, but when it comes up next in their queue it disappears. I can select the fox as the active character and tell it to go places. I still have to try just filling the bowl generally and then seeing if I can control the fox to eat the food. I think I tried telling it to sleep on the pet bed and it wasn't an option.

I honestly don't know if none of this should be possible but it's happening because of weird interactions with mods, or if this is supposed to happen and the mods are accidentally limiting some options.

But I already watched one elderly fox I'd befriended get reaped, so I'm not looking forward to the next time. If this circumstance happens again, I might move the person and see if I can leave the fox behind as the sole resident of a property.

EDIT: Further experimentation reveals that I could order the fox to go places, but not to eat dog food or sleep on a bed. I could tell it to nap outside, but not inside. I decided I was going to get rid of the fox since I can't do much with it, so I didn't want to mess with it. I went to the world map and family management and the game was trying to read the fox as a human person, so it was stretched into a standing position and floating in midair in the family portrait. It looked like someone hung up a fox skin. I tried to separate it out into its own family, but no dice. So I stuck it in Baby Ariel's family where I can safely forget about it.

My sim's dog (Active, Loyal and Friendly) barks at the chickens, and they seem to cluck back at him, looking like they are interacting with each other. He has a thought bubble of chickens when he sees them, and they have thought bubbles of him. They definitely notice each other at least. At one point my oldest and strongest rooster (who successfully fought off a fox) was engaged in a spirited bout of barking, then clucking, and barking etc with him which almost seemed like a conversation. The rooster was flapping happily at the end of it and had gone up in happiness level so that he was listed as Very Happy by the end. So they seemed to get some social points from each other too. But my dog has never yet noticed the foxes skulking about (usually at night or early morning).