[CoL] Animals stuck/disappeared in inventory (Patch 1.108.318)

This is quite the consistent issue which I have once again - stuck cow during rebuild on the lot. Current thread status is "Needs info" - indeed WE do need info what is going on.

I start to suspect it might be related to a routing problem - a cow/llama needs to be "linked" to their respective shed so if you have 2-3 sheds and place the animal on the wrong "object" (not the one they were initially assigned to) they will be stuck in-world without complete path to their shed. Can we get anything like

Option 1 - reset the shed to "no animal assigned" (if there is - send it to household inventory), delete animals in household inventory (yes, the shed will most likely get stuck, but we can delete it and buy a new one?)

Option 2 - There must be some kind of an "assigned animal" attribute for the game to know exactly which animal is supposed to be in the shed and when there is no such animal in the family (in-world and stuck in our inventories)  the shed should be able to reset to "no animal assigned"

I do not want to resort to mods to resolve this, but it has been so long since this is a problem that I am starting to consider it.

Workaround found so far (no mods, no cheats, just enough simoleons needed to buy back the furnished lot)

Edit: thanks to suggested approach by lulimay 🤩 (in another platform) I was able to clean up the inventory and retain every crafted item, painted picture, taken photo, milestone! (which was my main goal as this was in a legacy save). Even kept the upgrades. Below the exact steps I took:

1 Step: move out every single item you want to keep as this will fully clean/zero out the household inventory, the fridge, the bookshelves, the children toys, any storage box filled with anything (and just in case out of the sim's inventory, although it kept it for me). This also resets collections back to "no items found ever",  so if you kept any collectibles - place them somewhere on the ground.

2 Step: I unassigned any animals (chickens from coup, just in case), ensured there is no shed with an animal - I had only the bugged one so I deleted it. Now there was only 1 cow stuck in the "Household Inventory Zoo". Basically you are ready with this when the game thinks "there are no animals in this household"

3 Step: Backup save file(s).  Doing it as a third step as it was quite painful to move out every single item from the storage box. You can always restore this save if you forgot something or just want to try a different approach.

4 Step: Started the game again and went to "Edit World". Add 1 new sim in the "broken" household (I called them Zoo Keeper). 

5 Step: Hit play on the family, just to ensure they are all "synced" and potentially take a look around if anything else needs to be placed on the walls/ground for safe keeping.

6 Step: went to "Edit World" again and manually moved my family members to a brand new household, transferred all their money (sufficient to buy the lot back) and left them "Not placed in World" (which is the important bit ! ). Now the only sim left with the household zoo was the Zoo Keeper.

7 Step: Through "Edit World" evicted the Zoo Keeper and left them "Not placed in World"

8 Step: Through "Edit World" added the original family back to the lot and selected "Furnished" and started playing. No animals stuck in inventory (which was now fully empty). I bought a new shed and it was empty, ready for animal purchase. :)

9 Step... well... all that inventory on the ground/walls... a bit of a maintenance, but at least my legacy had everything again. Good thing I checked the collections first (through one of the sims) and found out they were zeroed out as well. So all collectibles had to go through a sim inventory to "re-collect" them

If this helps at least one more person it was worth posting it here. lulimay is my hero, so kudos to them for thinking about this approach!