Is anyone else having problems with animals not eating?

[Seriously Unserious]

I've been noticing for the last 3 Alphas (I started playing on Alpha 15) that my animals will periodically stop eating, or specific ones will, and I won't see any reason for them to not eat. Right now, I have 2 husky puppies not eating to the point I'm getting warnings of Animal Starvation. I have a freezer bursting at the seams with meat, milk, eggs, and other foods I know dogs can eat in RW, yet they just wander around aimlessly and won't eat any of that food. It is in their allowed area, so I know that's not the problem.

Is anyone else having issues with animal behaviour where they won't eat even when they're starving and do have food available to eat? The reason I'm asking is that I'm not sure if this is a bug, or a strategy issue.

[Dashthechinchilla]

I have the issue sometimes because puppies follow their owner on a priority task like hunt. The animal forgets to eat first or like a puppy gets hungry faster maybe.

[Seriously Unserious]

I've had that too, but in this case those 2 puppies are not following anyone, they're just wandering around refusing to go to the ample food supply and eat it.

I've also had some of my farm animals do this from time to time. There'll be tons of wild grass, haygrass and harvested hay in their allowed area, yet they'll just wander around as far from those food sources as possible and starve. They certainly don't have any master to follow so that can't be the only reason for this behaviour.

[Bozobub]

This seems to go away if you have them move to a different defined area *for just a moment* of unpaused game time, then resetting to their normal area(s).  This can reset many sorts of animal weirdness, if you're lucky =).

[Seriously Unserious]

This seems to go away if you have them move to a different defined area *for just a moment* of unpaused game time, then resetting to their normal area(s).  This can reset many sorts of animal weirdness, if you're lucky =).

Interesting. I didn't realize that, but I think I did do that this time by setting them to Home zone, then back to my special "Dogs" zone, and they just continued their "wandering" behavior. Last time I had this Animal Eating issue, I literally had to choose between letting them starve to death, or go into the save file and edit their food level out of the red zone, and then they did eventually start eating again.

If I'm not the only one having this issue then it's probably a bug in the animal behavior algorithm. Perhaps they're not detecting food under certain situations, or are not setting their task to and "Eat" task or something.

[asanbr]

This seems to go away if you have them move to a different defined area *for just a moment* of unpaused game time, then resetting to their normal area(s).  This can reset many sorts of animal weirdness, if you're lucky =).

I was going to suggest this too. Can't point out specific cases, but I have seemingly solved various issues by resetting the zones.