There is no need to stand gazing at a pathetic pile of corpses to get a sense of Cooley's troubled fields. The sombre men in white overalls waiting beside a cattle truck outside a small farmhouse yesterday morning was all anyone needed to know about the grief visited on those within.
The disinfectant mats, the footbaths, the hardship, the separations, the waiting, the rashers and the sandwiches confiscated at checkpoints, the terror building then receding . . . all come to this.
The uncomfortable looking men in overalls, the truck, the quiet sobbing, the day-old lambs scampering around their mothers. Anyone who still believes that animals represent nothing more than commercial units to their owners should be here at this hour.
Aidan Kirk can barely speak. His shoulders heave in the effort to staunch the tears. He is only 23 and has just discovered that he's on the "list". "Ninetythree", he whispers. "Going tomorrow".
Nothing fell into Aidan's lap, nothing except a talent for judging cattle. His father is not a farmer and it was with his grandfather that he started off at the age of three, picking out suck calves. Even then, he could pick out the one in a hundred that others would miss, says his uncle, Bernard Murnaghan.
"It was the love of them," says Aidan. "I always wanted to be a farmer."
As he grew bigger, so did the cattle he bought, keeping them on his uncle's farm. "I kept building it up, borrowing money, buying cattle. Went through BSE when cattle that I paid £800 for had to be sold for £50 or £100 less. Then I picked up again, kept at it.
"One day I had a load of cattle heading out on the boat and it was turned back - the Russians had stopped buying beef and the price collapsed. I got stuck in again, bought some more. We got a couple of good years. They were just ready to go out to grass in the next week or two. We were getting the fences ready.
"A Department vet was out checking my cattle on Tuesday morning and said `I'll hardly be back with you till Saturday and maybe less and less again after that'."
Then on Thursday morning, he was talking on the road with two others farmers when someone rang with the news. "We just looked at one another," he says with another great heave of the shoulders. "We said good luck and we parted."
As every farmer knows, beef is unpredictable. "It's all to do with judging, good luck and good husbandry," he says. "There was BSE in Co Louth but none of our neighbours were ever caught out with it. There was no BSE in Cooley," he says, raising his chin with a glimmer of pride.
But it's only for an instant.
"My heart's probably broken all right. They say time's a healer but I'll take a break from the whole thing anyway."
He has little choice but to take a break, for six months at least. Meanwhile, he will have great swathes of time on his hands that he never had before - not even as a child. Though working off-farm with his father, he devoted at least two hours a day, more at weekends, to tending his herd. The days stretch ahead, bereft of the thing he loves most. "But I'm not as badly off as the other farmers I know because my cattle weren't kept where I live. At least I won't have to face an empty yard outside my own back door."
The people of Cooley are an industrious, resilient people. Most, says farmer David Kearney, would have other strings to their bow. But what if the other string also depends on farming? Dan O'Connell started an agricultural supply business 13 years ago to support the farm. On Thursday afternoon, it simply hasn't occurred to him that his herd could be in the cull.
By tea-time, he was numb with shock: "We've been in this all our lives and my father before me and his before him, and they came through hard times. But this - I don't think there's been worse than this. I'm 48, the bloodlines in these cattle are older than me."
All around us, farming supplies ranging from fertiliser to sheep feed and fencing posts, feeding troughs and wheelbarrows lie waiting for customers. The silence is eerie. The only animals in sight are a shaggy dog and a cat.
"The past month has definitely had an impact. Farmers would normally buy forward when they have the money but they haven't been doing that.
They're only buying for today."
Back in the Ballymascanlon Hotel, more sombre farmers, many of them IFA activists, armed with the Department of Agriculture's "condemned" list, mobile phones, local knowledge and more than a little empathy, have taken on the job of informing people that their flocks and herds are to be wiped out.
The first woman on the list, phoned at 10 a.m. on Thursday morning, cried pitiably. The little group frets about elderly bachelor farmers in particular, broken men hardly able to comprehend what is befalling them. Neighbours are contacted and asked to keep an eye on them, family members informed and advised to maybe take them away for a while.
Tom Parlon, president of the Irish Farmers' Association arrives, on a positive note: "Well. . . you're keeping it outside the house anyway," he says, shaking hands with Liam Woods. It's what they always say, he says. Once trouble is outside the house, outside the family, it can be borne.
Liam, a 60-year-old, substantial farmer, is to be "forced into retirement. . . A big farm of land and no livestock on it. What do I do?"
"You're talking about lifetimes, generations of sheep breeders and sheep breeding," says Tom Parlon, "and then there's guy going around with a gun - bang, bang, bang. . . " Compensation is important but it cannot retrieve what has taken generations to build. "Imagine someone coming into this hotel and saying: `We're razing it to the ground' - it's the same thing," says Fine Gael councillor Terry Brennan.
What do you say to a caller, such as the one who phoned Ulster radio, to say that it was "good enough for the farmers. . . they're always complaining"? To those who say that the farmer cuddling the lamb on Sky TV would soon have been taking money to see it served up with mint sauce anyway?
"A farmer strives to try and keep a lamb alive, to keep it well and healthy - that's everything he works for," says Alan Bothwell, the 29-year-old chairman of the IFA's Cooley branch.
"He will eventually see it slaughtered but to see a day-old lamb being led away. . . My father's at home lambing sheep now. It's going to be very upsetting for him. And a farmer who's built a dairy herd up over a number of years - he'd know those cows individually.
"Some people are going to find this very hard to deal with on a personal level. And when they get the compensation, will they use it to restock? How long before they'll be allowed to do that? Could this happen all over again?"
Alan has virtually been in quarantine this past month, has seen little of his girlfriend and only been out to get food. Meanwhile, they've been religiously disinfecting themselves and their vehicles, changing their clothing if going outside the exclusion zone. Was it all in vain?
"I don't think it was. Everyone was trying to do what they could. It was better than doing nothing. They certainly wouldn't want to be living with the feeling that they'd done something to introduce it here."
How it reached the area remains a mystery. Michael Rice, the farmer whose animals showed up with the disease, is universally respected, "an exemplary sheep farmer," the kind of man, says farmer Niall Connolly, "who if he lost a lamb while lambing would be devastated."
The man's horror at finding his lambs dying (it is said that 18 died over a couple of days) can only be guessed at.
Dermot Ahern, the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, and a local TD, spends several hours here "to show a bit of solidarity with the Department of Agriculture staff. . ." Farmers have only good words for the vets and gardai assigned to the area. His Dundalk home suddenly fell within the new exclusion zone over Wednesday night and he is philosophical.
"Personally I always felt it was a miracle that we had survived so long. No matter what ring of steel was placed around us, the fact is that it's an airborne disease."
Not being a farmer himself (and admitting that he knows very little about it), his sympathy is equally with the business people in the area whose losses are climbing at a frightening rate.
"I've had more people on to me with problems who were not farmers and I've articulated that at Cabinet level. One of the first people to contact me was Anglo Printers in Drogheda. They print cards for the racing industry in Ireland and literally overnight, half the business was gone. They say it's costing them £10,000 a week. You have three excellent adventure centres in Carlingford with no business going on."
Hotels are losing valuable meetings and conferences. Horsetrainers and breeders like Ms Sally Cox are "confined to barracks", as she puts it, at what should be the height of their season. "Horses still have to be fed and lads paid. Our only other livelihood is a suckler herd. So it's hold your breath time."
Although March 22nd, 2001, will always be etched on the brain of a certain generation, Cooley will survive. "This thing won't be here forever," says Dan O'Connell, "we just have to stumble on. There has to be a long road out there for all of us and some good at the end of it."
The peninsula has had more than its share of trials over the decades. "We have had tragedies like the murder of Tom Oliver, the deaths in Carlingford Lough, whole families wiped out in accidents, but we have shown that we are a resilient people and can pull together in times of trouble. We have proven that," says Councillor Brennan.
"This is a small place - about 20 miles by five, surrounded by water on one side and the Border on the other. If we can contain the disease within these confines, we will have done a great job for our country.
"That's what's important now".