Unable to interact with animal followers?

[bjornk]

If you are unable to interact with animal followers such as Meeko, the stray dog etc. (or perhaps with other non-human followers) or in other words, you don't see the dialogue menu or certain dialogue options that are supposed to be there aren't shown, then look for a mod in your load order that overrides or redirects vanilla "dialogue topics" or "dialogue branches" related to followers (e.g. FollowerDialogue). In order to that, load up your entire plugin list in TES5Edit and for convenience, select "Apply Filter for Cleaning" which will show you the plugins that override these dialogue records. You can then either edit out these overrides or disable the entire plugin.

The reason why I post this is because yesterday I noticed that I couldn't "talk" to the stray dog that kept following me. I didn't tell it to follow me because there was no dialogue menu to begin with, and I couldn't tell it to stop following me either, for the same reason. Did a quick search and realized that there should be a dialogue menu that you can use to tell it to wait or to go home, but in my game, the dog just barks when I try to initiate a dialogue. After some testing I found out that the culprit was a retarded LL mod called GagSFX. It has a MCM option to disable overrides for followers, but disabling that does absolutely nothing, because the plugin itself overrides and redirects all vanilla records for dialogue branches related to followers, which include both human and animal followers, and the redirected dialogue topics have conditions that completely exclude animal followers (doesn't matter if the PC is actually gagged or not). I honestly can't remember why I installed this crap, but I'm not gonna remove the plugin in the middle of a playthrough, so I deleted all those overrides, and that naturally fixed the issue.

If you don't have any such mod, then keep in mind that vanilla dialogues also have conditions of their own, such as for the dog, for instance, it must be of the race DogCompanionRace (F1AC4) and must be a member of CurrentFollowerFaction (5C84E) in order to dismiss it etc. so make sure these conditions are all met otherwise you won't see the related dialogue options.