Wiktionary
dog fight
n. (alternative spelling of dogfight English)
Usage examples of "dog fight".
There couldn't anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog fight -- unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.
But whatever they said about Vimes, in the end the man had a handful of men and a lot of influential enemies who had families going back a thousand years and the same amount of honour that you'd find in a dog fight.
I recognized the thing from Holmes's description as being akin to the creature at the dog fight in the Hackney marches.