I am having this problem as well. I play on console so not a mod issue, and have not at any point disabled Horse Ranch or Cats and Dogs since the pack selection update. The animals appear in thumbnails when a new save is loaded but disappear when the save is reloaded or when entering Manage Households. I want the pets I paid for! I don't even want to play right now and potentiallly lose any pets I make myself
Ugh, same. I had bugs on both Sims 4 AND Sims 2 recently that were ruining my enjoyment or even ability to play in the case of 2 (the in-game snapshots kept going off and I didn't know how to stop it doing that).
I think the Sims 2 bug was down to a software compatibility issue between the game and the Razer Chroma software connected to the mouse and keyboard I had before I replaced them after doing a clean boot on a hunch.
I can spend the money to replace things if I know they're causing issues on my end; apparently all the money I spent on 4 over the years isn't enough for EA to fix their... let's be polite and say product, when there's something fundamentally wrong on their side.
