When former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to run a dogfighting operation, he had kept about 50 pit bulls on his 15-acre property in rural Surry County, Va. Headlines described the dogs as "menacing." Some animal rights groups called for the "ticking time bombs" to be euthanized as soon as Vick's case was closed.

Instead, the court gave Vick's dogs a second chance. U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ordered each dog to be evaluated individually. And he ordered Vick to pony up close to $1 million to pay for the lifelong care of those that could be saved.

Carol Guzy / Washington Post (ENLARGE)

Leo, a certified therapy dog, visits client Tanya Olsen, left, at the Oncology and Hematology Infusion Therapy Center clinic in Mountain View, Calif. Marthina McClay, Leo's foster guardian, is at right.

Carol Guzy / Washington Post (ENLARGE)

Living in foster care means that Leo, left, may one day get a forever home. Until then, he enjoys being fostered by Marthina McClay, founder of Our Pack, an Oakland, Calif.-based pit bull rescue organization. Leo also has friends in her pets, Hailey, right, and Dexter, in McClay's Los Gatos home.

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Of the 49 pit bulls animal behavior experts evaluated, only one was deemed too vicious to warrant saving and was euthanized.

More than a year after being confiscated from Vick's property, Leo, a tan, muscular pit bull, visits cancer patients as a certified therapy dog in California. Hector, who bears deep scars on his chest and legs, recently was adopted and is about to start training for national flying disc competitions in Minnesota. Gracie is a couch potato in Richmond, Va., who lives with cats and sleeps with four other dogs.

Of the 47 surviving dogs, 25 were placed directly in foster homes, and a handful have been or are being adopted. Twenty-two were deemed potentially aggressive toward other dogs and were sent to an animal sanctuary in Utah. Some, after intensive retraining, are expected to move on to foster care and eventual adoption.

How is it that some of these abused and reputedly vicious dogs can find new lives as pets? Frank McMillan, a veterinarian who is studying the recovery of some of the Vick dogs, said too little is known about pit bulls to say for sure.

"We've assumed all pits are the same, and we've never let this many fighting dogs live long enough to find out. There are hardly ever studies, because these animals don't survive," he said.

Aggression vs. isolation

Evaluators said that when they walked into the kennels where the Vick dogs were being held, they weren't sure what to expect.

"I thought, if we see four or five dogs that we can save, I'll be happy," said Randy Lockwood, an animal behaviorist with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "If we had to euthanize the majority, then we could at least say we'd tried."

Instead, they found dogs with behaviors that ran the gamut. Some "actually seemed happier around other dogs," said Rebecca Huss, a law professor and animal law expert who was appointed by the court to oversee the evaluations and determine the dogs' fates.

Once it became clear that the dogs might be allowed to live, evaluators gave them names: Iggy, Zippy, Cherry Garcia, Hazel, Little Red, Uba, Squeaker, Big Fella, Handsome Dan, Ginger, Ernie, Alf.

"One of the things that struck us immediately was that these dogs were more like the dogs we see rescued from animal hoarding situations," Lockwood said. "Their main problem was not aggressiveness but isolation."

Of Vick's dogs, 22 showed enough aggression that they could be held only at the tightly controlled sanctuary Best Friends Animal Society's 3,700-acre Dogtown sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. There, McMillan, the veterinarian, has developed a "personalized emotional rehabilitation plan" for each.

All but two are now on "green collar," meaning they are open and friendly to human visitors. About nine have begun to have supervised play dates with other Vick dogs.

The remaining Vick dogs were given to seven animal rescue organizations across the country, which placed them in experienced foster homes. Many are in the process of being adopted.

Changing the stereotype

Sharon Cornett, a member of the Richmond, Va., Animal League's board, agreed to foster Gracie and is now adopting her. "I adore this dog. She is just a love bucket," Cornett said.

Still, Cornett and other pit bull rescuers say that they never leave the dogs unsupervised with other animals.

John Goodwin, a dogfighting expert with the Humane Society and a proponent of euthanizing fight dogs, is skeptical of the emerging reports of the Vick dog recoveries.

"The behavior is bred into them," he said. "... These pit bulls should never be left alone with other dogs, because you never know when that instinct to fight another dog is going to surface."

Tim Racer, who took in 10 Vick dogs, disagrees.

"You have 150 years of man trying to produce an aggressive dog. But you have tens of thousands of years of Mother Nature preceding that," he said. "Dogs are pack animals. They survived because of their pack. ... It's hard-wired into their genes that they do no harm to each other."

Indeed, long before a glowering pit bull came to symbolize tough guy vogue, pit bulls were the all-American dog. In the Civil War era, they were known as nurse dogs because they were so good with children. Pit bulls sold war bonds, earned medals in World War I and starred in such TV shows as "The Little Rascals."

All the more reason, Racer and other rescuers say, to look at each dog individually.

"Every thoroughbred is not a great racehorse. Every pit bull, even if it's of fighting stock, is not an aggressive dogfighter," said Steve Zawistowski, an animal behaviorist with the ASPCA who helped assess the Vick dogs. "There are no simple answers."