MUZAFFARGARH, Sept 3: Butchers in connivance with the Tehsil Municipal Administration officials are playing with the health of locals as they sell unhygienic and weigh less meat at inflated rate, and the TMA is reluctant to take any action against them.

The city’s sole slaughterhouse was established in 1985 near Chungi No 1, but it is in a derelict state and one can find stray dogs occupying it all the time.

There are no water supply, electricity or drainage arrangements at the slaughterhouse, which compel the butchers to stay away and instead slaughter animals at their shops or houses. Since its establishment not even a single animal has been slaughtered there.

Butchers deceive the general public by showing them a healthy animal with a promise that the animal will be slaughtered the next day.

Now God knows whether they slaughter the same animal the following day or any other instead, however, no doctor usually checks the quality of meat before it is sold to the locals.

Butchers claim that they bribe veterinary officials on a monthly basis to get the slaughtered animal stamped without any formal inspection.

Butchers usually purchase sick animals at discount prices and then earn good money by selling meat at the prices fixed by them and not by any law-enforcing authority.

Though rate lists set beef prices at Rs80 per kilo and mutton at Rs200 per kilo, but the butchers generally charge Rs100 for beef and Rs250 for mutton without any check by the officials concerned.

Also, they cheat buyers by selling indeed less quantity of meat than its weight shown on the scales. They use water to douse the meat inflating its weight by 25 per cent. For example, 750 gram meat soaked with water will weigh 1,000 gram on their scales. Thus, they in fact loot public by selling falsely weighed meat openly.

An animal dealer of Kotla Leghari says he buys ailing animals and sells it to butchers at discount prices.

He said a week ago, he bought a cow suffering from various diseases weighing up to three maunds for just Rs5,000 and then sold it out to a butcher for Rs9,500, who would have sold its meat to the public and earned thousands more.

A butcher requesting not to be named said they could not go to the slaughterhouse because it lacked proper arrangements. He said absence of proper water supply and drainage system pushed everyone to remain aloof from the slaughterhouse.

One butcher said goats were short in supply and their prices were very high. He said they used to buy these animals from villagers who charged high prices, and that was why they were forced to use water to enhance meat’s weight and compensate their loss.

TMO Malik Farid Khairani said the TMA never allocated any budget to look after the slaughterhouse because elected representatives were least interested in maintaining and ensuring public health.

He urged media to highlight this issue so that the councillors should attend to this pathetic situation and the hazards confronting the life of locals could be eliminated.