A crack in the corrugated iron wall showed the bare bulb lighting the shed for Department of Agriculture vets as they carried out their task.
John Wehrly, a native of Ravensdale, Co Louth, stands a short distance from the shed where his son's sheep are being shot. The lambs, some just hours old, are killed with lethal injection.
"I've said to him to keep your chin up - there's worse off than you, you farm part-time and have another job, it's not your life. My brother has been a sheep farmer for 50 years. He tends them twice a day. Tomorrow when he gets up he'll have nothing to do, he'll have nowhere to go."
His brother Owen arrived in a four-wheel-drive vehicle but would not comment.
The men were just two of the 24 farmers within a 1 km radius of the Rice family holding in Proleek, Ravensdale, whose animals were killed yesterday afterthe first case of foot-and-mouth disease in the Republic was confirmed there.
Late yesterday, the Department of Agriculture decided no more animals would be killed on farms but would instead be taken to abattoirs for slaughtering and rendering. However, the animals belonging to Michael Rice (81) continued to be killed on site.
In a brief telephone call, Mrs Teresa Rice said the family were "coping as best we can". The lane leading to the family home in Jenkinstown was sealed off by a Garda car with two officers in white overalls at the farm gate.
The local curate, Father Sean Moore, said he had been inundated with phone calls from people asking him to pass on their best wishes to the family who were "highly respected".
He felt the experience was worse than a bereavement as that would affect only one family while the outbreak had affected everybody.
"The entire community is in total shock and at this stage it is almost too early for them to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It will be a matter of getting through the next few days and weeks first," said Father Moore.
The Treanor family, who live close to the Rice family, also kept 180 sheep in Ravensdale which were slaughtered yesterday. Mrs Treanor said she feared the cull would extend to their 115-strong cattle farm in Cooley.
"It would be bad enough to look at our own fields without animals but if every field on the peninsula was without a sheep or a cow it would be terrifying," she said, commenting on reports that up to 40,000 animals would be killed.
"We had a calf born there last night and we're looking at it today and thinking it might not be with us tomorrow."
However, compensation was at the back of everybody's minds, she said. "The cows are so sensitive, I was out with them earlier and you'd swear they knew something was wrong."
The farms of two nephews of Michael Rice are located in Belurgan, on the edge of the exclusion zone. A wife of one of the men said the extended family were devastated but preparing themselves for even further "heartbreak".
"Cooley will never be the same again, the shock of the people goes to the core and the whole economy will be plunged back too just when things were starting to go well," she said.