Environmental and Health Impacts from Slaughter Houses Located on the City Outskirts: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper explores the location of slaughter houses in the city outskirts, describes its functioning and explores its impact on the environment and health of residents living in its vicinity. A medium sized city of North India, Aligarh, was selected for the case study. The study is mainly based on primary sources of data collected through survey of city ouskirts, slaughter houses, villages and households located in its vicinity. For in-depth investigation, 2 slaughter houses located in the outskirts, 460 households living in the vicinity of these slaughter houses (0 to 3 km) were randomly selected for sampling. Data were collected with the help of questionnaire. Field surveys revealed that there were innumerable authorized and unauthorized slaughter houses inside the city, Makdoomnagar was the oldest one (1995), individual households in many parts of the city were slaughtering animals in one room, the city outskirts had 6 big slaughter houses and meat processing units and innumerable open illegal ones. Investigations revealed that all the slaughter houses suffer from very low hygienic standards posing both environment and health hazards due to discrete disposal of waste, highly polluted effluent discharge, burning and boiling of bones, hooves, fat, meat, etc. The results show that for the residents living in the immediate vicinity of the slaughter house, both the environmental conditions and their health conditions were worst.