Squads in Mouding, Yunnan province, grabbed pets from their owners while they were out for walks and beat them to death on the spot, the Shanghai Daily reported.

Dog owners were offered a five yuan (40p) reward for killing their animals. Those who attempted to hide their pets indoors were flushed out by late-night squads who made loud noises outside to make the dogs bark.

The cull was ordered after the death of three local people, including a four-year-old girl, from rabies during the last six months. State media said 360 of Mouding county's 200,000 residents had suffered dog bites this year. Pigs and cows have also been attacked.

Despite the vaccination of 4,000 animals, the number of dog attacks continued to rise, prompting the cull.

"With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs," Li Haibo, a spokesman, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency.

The slaughter began on July 25. Of the 50,000 dogs in the county, only army dogs and police dogs were spared.

The official newspaper Legal Daily blasted the killings as an "extraordinarily crude, cold-blooded and lazy way for the government to deal with epidemic disease," it said.

"Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place," the newspaper, which is published by the central government's Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online edition. The Xinhua agency said, also in an editorial, that the killings would not have been necessary if the local government had been more attentive, but called the slaughter "the only way out of a bad situation."

In a statement to media, president of the charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Ingrid Newkirk, said the group had cancelled orders of merchandise it sold that was made in China. "We are urging everyone to actively boycott - not a word we use lightly - anything from China given the bludgeoning killing of thousands of dogs" and examples of cruelty toward animals, she said.

Meng Xiaoshe, the editor of the Dog Daily website, described the cull as barbaric. "Among the dead animals there must be some with a licence and a vaccination certificate."

According to the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of rabies cases in China has risen in recent years, with 2,651 deaths reported in 2004. The centre's figures suggest it is a bigger killer than Aids and hepatitis combined.

The rise is partly down to a boom in pet ownership. Many families keep dogs but only 3% vaccinate their animals.

Piracy has also made the problem worse. Last year, two boys in Guangdong died of rabies, a disease against which their parents thought they had been inoculated. Police then found 40,000 boxes of fake vaccine.