Les habría cogido (vs Habrían cogido)

Question

¿Les habría cogido el alud? Hola, I’m confused about the construction  “les habría cogido”. Does coger require “a” after it, therefore “les”? Habrían cogido makes more sense to me. Muchas gracias.

Accepted Answer

Hola Shirley
Technically this should actually be using "los" because this sentence means: 
[Could it be that] the avalanche caught/reached them? 
The verb coger here is transitive as you can say that "something caught/reached you", therefore as a direct object pronoun you'd say "¿Los habría cogido el alud? 
You may be aware that sometimes (very often depending on the type of verb used) there's a tendency to use le/les as direct object pronouns - this is one of these cases, although as I said, technically the plural les is discouraged. 
I hope this clarified it. 
Here's a bit on leísmo.
Inma

Answer

Also it helps to ask, what is the subject of this sentence, “¿Les habría cogido el alud?”  The subject is “el alud”. So we could write the sentence in this order: “¿El alud les habría cogido?” Then we can see that the subject and verb do agree, “el alud … habría …” Note that “les” is not the subject, it just means “them”.