In that case, it’s just a cluster-fuck until a single dog finally gets the animal, and you have to wade into the team and try to retrieve it from that one dog. Yeah. That’s fun.

You will occasionally have fights between two dogs paired together, or a pair of dogs running one ahead of the other. If you have responsive, trained leaders, they will hold the line out tight and break up the fight (if it’s one dog wanting to get the dog in front of/behind him) or at least keep the other dogs from getting in on the action. You sink the snowhook and deal with the problem.

I have kicked fighting dogs apart in the past. You don’t want to get your hands into a dog fight (gloves or not), and there is no other way to stop it. So you do what you have to. Pulling them apart by their harnesses will work if there is more than one person there, but it is ineffective if the dog is more interested in fighting than listening once you let go.

Usually, however, yelling at the dogs involved as you stop the team will stop them long enough for you to hook down and switch dogs, put a dog in the basket, or do what you have to do in order to restore harmony.

Ulva and the others are correct — sled dogs very rarely fight when they’re working, because working comes first. If, however, there is a female in season, or you have two dogs who just absolutely hate each other for some reason, you may get arguments — usually no harm done, all snarling and snapping without any force kind of arguments.

Any dog who causes consistent problems in the team, or does damage to the other dogs through persistent fighting will be removed from the team. It is counter-productive, and no sled dog is valuable enough on the team to justify that (if they were that valuable, they’d be working instead of fighting). This trait has been largely bred out of sled dogs, because a musher who relies on his team to survive can’t do so if his dogs are constantly injured and unable to run due to fights, or he can’t get where he’s going because his team is too busy fighting. The natives who developed the primitive sledding breeds wouldn’t see the benefit in feeding/caring for a persistent trouble-maker; that dog would die, and wouldn’t survive to reproduce the trait.

I have heard stories about team fights, or mushers who have gotten hurt breaking up team fights, but these were usually novices who didn’t know how to pair their dogs, ran a bigger team than they could handle, or simply didn’t know the dogs well enough to control the situation.

Hope this helps!

Plus the musher is the pack leader, no bones about it. A real leader has no issues that can’t be solved.