So I've lost two cats out of nowhere and I'm trying to figure out if this is some sort of bug. I have zero mods and only store content as anything extra. Mods slow down my game too much so I'm going vanilla. Anyway, while playing the reaper suddenly showed up out of nowhere and claimed one of the cats. As this happened, I checked the food bowl and it was full. Yes, it was the cheap pet dish but before I adopted either one of the cats, I checked for the finicky trait to make sure it wouldn't make me buy the expensive dish. Neither cat had that trait and had used the food bowl plenty of times before that. Nor did their sim panels change from green at any time to indicate they were in severe mood drops. I assume starvation would have them turn red, right? I'd have seen that and acted accordingly. But that never happened.

When the first cat died, I kept the urn to see what color it would be should it decide to haunt. Their ghosts are either pink or red but it looks red to me. I read up and red meant death by fire but since it was not smoking, I had to conclude that it must be pink which was starvation. Again, perfectly in tact food bowl, nothing obstructing the cats from reaching it, and no emergency color in their sim panels to indicate their moods were very critical.

It happened again, later on with the second cat and again, it seemed to be of starvation but with a full food dish and no severe color change and it happened out of the blue. Again, neither cat has the finicky trait to make them turn their noses at eating out of the cheap food bowl and they had no qualms about it before. Is this a glitch or is there something I'm missing here?

Cats and dogs can ONLY die from old age. Their ghosts will be red, unless they have achieved a high number of lifetime points, and then their ghosts will be blue. You can bring them back to life with ambrosia or with the "oh my ghost" opportunity.

That’s the thing, neither cat was old. They’d both been adopted as kittens and hadn’t aged up past adulthood. The only cat to have died of old age was the final one. But the other two cats were still in the adult stage when they got taken