A North Carolina family wants answers after they say the animal shelter accidentally euthanized their 16-month-old Australian cattle dog, Blaze.“I was very angry, upset, emotional,” owner Rhea Varker told WXII.Emotions ran high as Varker and her three children went to visit Blaze at the shelter Tuesday, only to realize he was not there. “They first go back to his kennel and take a picture and come back out and show me the dog, and it’s not my dog,” Varker said. “My documentation that I filled out with animal control was there with the dog that they showed a picture of.”After Varker was asked to search the kennels herself for Blaze, she received news she never expected to hear. “The director comes out and pulls me to the side and explains to me that they accidentally euthanized my dog on Saturday,” Varker said. “The blame was left on the cleaning crew that comes in and cleans kennels basically stating that they just put the dog in the wrong spot. No other explanations were explained. I wasn’t offered the opportunity to identify my dog.”Blaze was under quarantine for biting her nephew earlier this month. Varker could not find his vaccine paperwork and said he was due for a rabies shot, so she had no choice but to leave him at the shelter. “My 8-year-old is my middle child, he’s very tender-hearted, very much a dog lover, animal lover of all kinds. He’s the one that it affected the most. He broke down and sobbed. Cried himself to sleep that night, cried himself to sleep last night. Keeps asking me questions about why, how did they do it, why did they do it,” Varker said. Assistant County Manager Casey Smith said it was a mistake with the dog’s paperwork. “Just a mishap with the paperwork. The intake paperwork, this was a bite dog that came in late last week. And when we had the paperwork, sometimes we had interim paperwork from animal control officers that we intake into our official intaking system at the shelter, and we had not done that yet because we only have two people there on the weekend, and a lot of animals that come in and the paperwork got crisscrossed, and an accident happened,” Smith said. “I sought them out and did kind of talk through some options with them to make it as less painful as possible for the family. Because again, it’s unfortunate, and there’s nothing I can do, obviously, to bring the animal back, but anything I could do within my power and within my means to help them along, I was willing to do so.”Smith said it was an unfortunate mistake and one they have never had happen before. “Out of 5,000 animals the animal shelter gets in a year times about four years since the county took the shelter back over since the UAC incident years ago we’re probably talking 20,000 animals, and this is the first time this has ever happened," Smith said.“They told us they were sorry and along with offering us another dog, they came up with the amount that we paid for the dog that he would offer us,” Varker said. “Another dog’s not going to replace it, just like they can offer us $10,000, that’s not going to bring our dog back. That’s not going to make our kids any less sad.”Varker said none of what they were offered will ever replace the family member that they lost. Now she wants change to ensure this never happens again. “I feel like there should have been several procedural checklists in place because the picture of the dog they showed me looked nothing like my dog. The colors weren’t even the same,” Varker said. “So, I feel like there should be something they’re checking before they euthanize animals to make sure that it is in fact the dog.”Smith said he is working on changing protocol as soon as possible. “The remorse, the sadness, the county’s deeply saddened by this. We’ll have to go through and put some protocols in place. Some backup protocols, maybe backing up euthanization paperwork. We’ll expedite these bite dogs to the front of the line going forward where they will get put in the system earlier than any other dogs that come in because, giving you an example, on Saturday, I had 10 of them,” Smith said. “Paint that you can spray-paint with animals that they do for Halloween that doesn’t hurt the animal and maybe put a dot on their back, a bright orange dot, so that way if the paperwork gets crisscrossed, it doesn’t matter. The dot is seen by any cleaner or anyone moving the animal out of the kennel, and they know because there are two kinds of animals, animals with owners and animals without, and if they see that dot they’ll know.”Smith also wants to remind pet owners to keep up with their pets’ vaccines. “This is a good opportunity to remind everybody to keep your animals vaccinated with the rabies and have the paperwork with you. Because had that paperwork would have been produced by the family, that animal could have stayed with the family for the 10-day quarantine instead of staying at the animal shelter. I’m not doing that as an excuse or demean the situation, but it’s just the volume of animals we get in. This was just a bad situation,” Smith said. “Don’t put off vaccinating your dog like we did. Yes, we are at fault for that,” Varker said. “I know the shelter’s full and they work hard and try to find homes for these dogs, but this isn’t an owner surrender situation, this wasn’t a stray situation, he was brought in by a Davidson County animal control officer and placed in their facility for observation.”The North Carolina Department of Agriculture is investigating the incident.