The 400 sheep and lambs were shot in the field where they had spent the past six weeks dying in the mud without food or shelter.

Villagers in High Legh had appealed to officials to slaughter the sheep which could not be moved due to Government restrictions imposed to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth.

"The culling was not the issue because these sheep would have been killed later anyway," said resident Toni Ghilks.

"But they should not have been allowed to suffer the way they did for so long.

"I feel ashamed to be human if that is the way we treat animals."

The carcasses were taken away shortly after the killing, removing all trace of the suffering and devastation witnessed in Crouchley Lane.

"To go past the field now there is not a drop of blood or any trace that the sheep had ever been there." said Mrs Ghilks. "The terrible scene I had witnessed just disappeared over night."

More than 100 sheep and lambs had already died.

"Our main concern was to put those sheep out of their misery and that has been done now," said Paul Gardiner, who lives in a cottage opposite the field. "It was a distressing sight to see dying sheep wandering around ones that were already dead."

The sheep had been brought to the fields for lambing from Glossop before the foot-and-mouth outbreak and should have been there for six weeks.

Tatton MP Martin Bell had urged the Intervention Board to issue a special licence for the disease-fee animals to be culled.

"I talked to the board but in High Legh they were slow to react," he said. "The animal crisis has been horrendous and everyone was slow to catch on to the scale of the problem."

A board spokesman said they were slow to get started because the 1.8 million diseased animals registered for slaughter took priority.

"We did not start slaughtering disease-free animals until March 3 and licences have been issued on a priority basis," he said.