Illegal slaughtering puts health of Kochiites at risk

Kochi: City corporation authorities on Friday morning raided and sealed an illegal meat stall at Chambakkara market hours after news broke that a six-month-old buffalo calf was butchered there. The incident threw light on the dearth of authorized slaughterhouses in the city.

On an average, 15 tonnes of meat is consumed every day in Ernakulam, and the only authorized abattoir in the city is at Kaloor. If around six tonnes of meat are dressed at the Kaloor slaughterhouse in a day, the remaining nine tonnes are dressed at 600-odd illegal abattoirs across the city, that too without going through any medical examination.

"While majority of the stalls in east Kochi sell meat that are checked and OKed from the Kaloor slaughterhouse, not a single kilogram of meat sold in west Kochi is tested," said a stall owner in a meat market in Ernakulam.

Meanwhile, meat sellers in Mattancherry pointed out that it is impractical to transport buffaloes to Kaloor from Mattancherry and take the meat back after dressing.

"Already we are purchasing buffaloes at a high price. For transporting them to Kaloor, we will have to spend thousands of rupees," a stall owner said.

When asked about how they ensure the fitness of the animal, he said: "All these animals are put to travel up to 24 hours from Tamil Nadu and Telangana to Kerala. If they are unfit, they would die by the time they reach the Kerala border."

Authorities admitted that there should be at least three more slaughterhouses in west Kochi. "There was a corporation-run slaughterhouse at Mattancherry. It was closed around seven years ago due to poor hygiene. It is high time that the corporation set up modern slaughterhouses," said V P Chandran, opposition councillor from Chambakkara.

The situation at Kaloor abattoir is not desirable. "A minimum of 60 buffaloes are brought to Kaloor on weekdays and the figure goes up to 250 on Saturdays and 200 on Sundays. It takes at least five minutes to medically examine a buffalo (around 12 buffaloes are inspected in an hour) and there is only one doctor to check all the buffaloes. Apart from that, there would be at least 100 goats brought for slaughter everyday," a source from the health department said.

"The corporation has submitted a Rs 12-crore detailed project report (DPR) to the state government to reconstruct the slaughterhouse at Marakkadavu in Mattancherry," said V K Minimol, chairperson of the corporation health standing committee.

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