Ivy was a tough dog from the wrong side of the tracks and after she got into a fight with another dog she was taken to “doggie downtown.”

“The owner actually broke up the fight and was bit in the middle of breaking up the fight. Therefore she had to go into bite quarantine,” says Leslie Sans, Executive Director of Dallas Pets Alive!

Was Ivy a bad dog? Nope, Dallas Pets Alive! found out her story was a little more complicated than that.

“The owner told me that she had tied Ivy up for two years to a tree in her backyard and that was the life that she lived,” says Sans. “We believe that she was in some way shape or form abused by a man. She for a long time did not do well with men.”

Dallas Pets Alive! was sure there was a sweet dog under that that tough exterior.

“We put her into a really intense behavior training program and she really just blossomed,” says Sans.

Once she bloomed, they found Ivy the perfect “furr-ever” family, but things didn’t start out that well.

“She tried to eat me through the door,” said her new owner Bob Murphy. “Then I went into her pen five minutes later and we’ve been friends ever since.”

It was a lot of work, but Bob stuck it out with Ivy.

“We’ve spent a lot of time walking her and walking her with strangers that she didn’t know,” he says. “She’s met several men now and she hasn’t tried to eat one for a while. So she`s come a long ways.”

Now we see a new side of Ivy.

“She’s very intelligent, she can do everything on verbal command and she can do a lot of things with no verbal command at all,” says Murphy.

From fighting and biting, to sitting and staying, Ivy proves every dog can make a turn around from tough to tender.