How does the dog work in GTA 6?

Grand Theft Auto V put Lamar’s dog in Franklin’s care and let you throw a ball for him. 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, the dog at the player’s side and, in the Launch Trailer, a dog in goggles at a helicopter’s door are the whole of the evidence we have, and this page stays inside it.

What the material 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, and under a thin rule DOG on L2. The layout matches the dialogue prompts elsewhere in the video, so it reads as a contextual menu rather than a one-off scripted moment. Two of the three are self-explanatory. What STUDY does, none of the frames we have says; its glyph is drawn differently from the other two, and the page on the prompts describes how.

The dog is in the frame too, sitting at the player’s side and looking up at him, and behind them, by the wall, lie a cushion, a blue blanket and a dark bowl. 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.

The Launch Trailer puts a dog somewhere else entirely. In the Launch Trailer, a dog in orange-rimmed goggles is at the feet of a man in a backwards cap and a plate carrier, at the open side door of a helicopter at night, his gloved hand at its head (0:32). Whether it is the dog from 1:57 of the Extended Look, and why it is in a helicopter, the shot does not say.

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 a dog goes with you in a vehicle, as one is in a helicopter at 0:32 of the Launch Trailer.
• 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 Lamar’s Rottweiler, living with Franklin for most of the story. 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. Petting did reach the game later: in GTA Online’s The Contract, the wiki notes, “The player can interact with Chop by petting him”. A menu with SCOLD and STUDY beside PET goes further than that, and what the other two do is the open question.

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.