Virginia State Police are investigating an animal shelter after a former employee accused it of treating animals inhumanely, including unnecessarily euthanizing some.

News outlets report Tina Auth left her job at the Madison County Animal Shelter Aug. 27 and has since accused it of not properly caring for injured animals as well as killing some healthy animals without trying to get them adopted.

Auth says she was instructed to tell visitors only sick or dangerous animals were euthanized, but she says this wasn't the case.

Tina Auth worked for the Madison shelter for about two years and says injured animals didn't receive medical care, and some healthy animals were killed without efforts being made to adopt them out.

Auth says she realized there were problems at the shelter almost immediately when she started working there.

"It was devastating, and I knew that I needed to make a change,” she said. “I have been documenting everything since my second week there because I knew there was something very wrong."

Auth says she's haunted by what she saw over those two years.

"The suffering of animals who didn't receive medical care,” she said. “Animals who were elderly who didn't get medical care at all until it was too late for them."

She says one video she took shows a cat brought to the shelter after it was attacked by dogs. The cat didn't receive veterinary care all night. It was dead by the next morning.

"The cat was suffering immensely, gasping for breath, very cold,” Auth said. “It's horrible."

She also says healthy kittens were euthanized even when the person who surrendered them paid the adoption fee upfront to make adoption more likely.

"Those animals are murdered that day, and the adoption fees are deposited," Auth said.

She says management forced shelter employees to lie about what happened to animals that were euthanized.

Auth resigned from her job at the shelter this month after she was disciplined for missing work to hold a long-planned and publicized fundraiser for the shelter.

She says she didn't come forward before now because she thought she needed more evidence of animal mistreatment. But she says statistics from the Virginia Department of Agriculture back up her claims that something is wrong.

2018 shelter

shows the shelter euthanized 9% of the dogs and 49% of the cats it handled. That's twice the rate for public shelters in Virginia,

.

"What is happening behind the scenes that the shelter manager is allowing to happen is not right and the public needs to know," Auth said.

Madison Animal Shelter Manager Greg Cave declined to comment and referred CBS19 to Madison County Administrator Jack Hobbs.

Hobbs did not return a call requesting comment, but in an emailed statement, he said that the county has asked the Virginia State Police to investigate. He says the Virginia Department of Agriculture is conducting its own investigation.

“We welcome this opportunity to review our animal shelter policies to confirm that Madison County is in compliance with state law and modern best practices,” he wrote.