Looking for a lost pet, found... an animal? Hello. I'm mostly a lurker and, as you might guess from my writing style, not a native speaker. My country has a lower obesity rate, which is partly why I was so surprised.  As indicated in the title, I'm looking for my pet. I went out today and took the opportunity to look nearby, hoping to find him. I'm fairly sure someone nearby feeds him occasionally, so I decided to try an alley near my home. It looked promising: there were other pets, but no big, scary dogs, and lots of place to hide from the harsh sun.  I went in, didn't find him, and forced myself to ask a few people if they had seen him, with a photo in my hand for easier identification (it's easier and more efficient than the poor description I could provide). No one had seen my pet, so I thanked them and walked away, out of the alley, which had turned out to be a cul-de-sac, both literally and metaphorically. Then as I was getting nearer the entrance, I started smelling something strange. It reminded me of a horse, which was obviously wrong in hindsight since it was in the wrong side: instead of being towards the side where grass and sufficient space for a pony can be found, it was towards the road. Still, I walked towards the source, expecting a small horse or something. You can take a guess at what I found instead. It had once been female. It looked to be at least 60, and far larger than most people I've seen in my country. Hell, it was larger than many people I've seen in the UK. With its open top, I could see glimpses of udders that were bigger than my head, no doubt with fat content higher than camembert. And it was walking out of its house to sit in a chair in the shade. It saw I was looking, so I was as polite as I could be and explained why a stranger had been walking into the alley for no apparent reason. It sat in its chair smelling revolting, then said that it hadn't seen my particular pet, while complaining about having six cats of its own and being exhausted and what have you.  Thankfully, something came out of it: it pointed out someone that could help and that a place that I hadn't dared walking into, thinking it probably belonged to someone, was in fact abandoned. So I went right back and looked some more. When I walked out again, the smell was gone, and so was it. It was a surprise, but I can't say it was unwelcome: between the time I found it and the time I walked back out, less than five minutes had passed, and I had dreaded smelling that again. So now that I'm back home, I'm in disbelief: how could someone smell so bad from several meters away? I don't even have a keen nose. If anything, my sense of smell is dull, so it had to be particularly bad for me to be able to smell it from where I was.