Windows Sheep not producing

[Zylos]

Upon loading my save, my sheep will not produce anything until I have manually pet them at least once during that session. After that I no longer need to manually pet them unless I quit out and load back in.
I have:
11 deluxe barns full of sheep, about 7 of which have 5 heart sheep, and the rest varying heart levels.
1 barn with 9 cows +1pig/goat/ostrich
1 coop with 9 chickens + 1 duck/dino/rabbit
Rancher + Shepherd professions (meaning 5 heart sheep should be producing every day and others producing every 2 days)
Auto Collectors and Auto Petters in every barn and my coop
All my animals have good mood

The problem doesn't seem to happen with any of the other animals (though I am only 100% sure its not a problem with cows and chickens since the others do not produce daily).

Bug is kind of annoying since I thought Auto Petters were supposed to make it so I didn't have to manually pet them anymore and I have a lot of animals.

 

[TheWolfoftheStars]

I came to the forums to report a very similar, if not the exact same, problem! I have a few auto-petters, and they seem to be working fine for all my other animals, but not for the sheep. I also have the Rancher and Shepherd professions, so they should be producing wool every day (and a majority of them should be iridium-quality) but if I don't pet them manually, they don't produce, and they give me lower-quality wool when they do.

Other info from my end, if it helps:
-Linux v 1.5
-all animals are in deluxe barns/coops and are kept fed through my silos, and have heaters for winter
-all animals are at max hearts
-all barns/coops have auto-collectors
-tested with cows (brown and white), chickens (brown, white, blue, and void), goats, ducks, ostriches, dinosaurs, bunnies, and sheep. The sheep are the only ones not responding to the auto-petter
-I'm in year 8, and it's been happening since I first tried an auto-petter with the sheep in year 5 or 6

The only thing I could think of is if the sheep get cranky that they can't find any grass to eat outside, and have to eat hay inside? But that has happened with my other animals, too, and they still produce their respective animal products for me. Including the dinos and bunny, who I keep inside 24/7. (Those vicious monsters must not be allowed to see the light of day!)

But yes, it is rather frustrating to need to keep petting my sheep daily. I know keeping animals is a far less popular choice than crop farming, so I'm not really surprised that not many folks have noticed lol. Still, the ten whole people who play this game that actually farm loads of animals (aside from pigs) count, too!

 

[TastySpuds]

I'm having the exact same issue. I'm on iOS and am playing on the beach farm with the intention to go rancher -> shepherd and have a whole bunch of sheep producing wool in barns daily. I got to the stage where I started investing in auto-petters and I've ended up having the exact same bug as described above. It took a couple of weeks in game to figure out what was going on but it's been frustrating spending a considerable amount of time building up to a particular strategy only to have a bug completely wreck said strategy.