How does the dog work in GTA 6?

Grand Theft Auto V gave Franklin a dog and let you throw a ball. GTA 6’s Extended Look shows something a step further: a menu of things to do to a dog, drawn in the corner of the screen the way the game draws its dialogue choices. Four words on four buttons is the entire evidence, and this page stays inside it.

What the footage shows

At 1:57 the bottom right of the screen carries a short stack of prompts: SCOLD on circle, PET on triangle, STUDY on R1. Below them a thin rule, and under that DOG on L2, the context line at the foot of the stack. The layout is the same one the dialogue prompts use elsewhere in the video, a stacked list with one button each, so it reads as a contextual menu rather than a one-off scripted moment. Two of the three are self-explanatory. STUDY is not, and its glyph is drawn differently from the other two, an R1 button inside a grey ring where SCOLD and PET have plain discs; that reads as a different button state, and what it is conditional on, nothing in the material says.

What the frame does not show is the dog doing anything: no fetch, no attack, no finding, no walk. It shows that the game has a vocabulary for dogs and that the vocabulary includes praise, blame and something else.

What nobody knows

• Whose dog it is, and whether Jason or Lucia owns one.
• What STUDY does, and why its button is drawn in a ring.
• Whether the dog follows you, fights, fetches or finds things.
• Whether scolding and petting change anything over time.
• Whether other animals get the same menu.

How Grand Theft Auto V did it

This is the reference, not a prediction. Chop was Franklin’s Rottweiler. You could throw a ball for him to fetch and bring back, take him for walks anywhere, and in missions switch to Chop to find people or checkpoints; he could help find hidden packages, and while out walking he would attack pedestrians Franklin targeted or anyone who attacked him first. His training lived outside the game, in the iFruit companion app, where you bought him collars and taught him tricks like sit and paw, and the GTA Wiki records that all of that was lost when the app’s servers shut down on 12 December 2022. A menu with SCOLD and PET on it reads as that relationship brought inside the game, which is where it should have been.

What this page becomes on launch day

From 19 November 2026 this guide is rewritten from the release build: what each command does, what STUDY is, what the dog is for and whether it can be lost, each with the date it was tested. Until then the short answer at the top stands.