Activists protest MCG's abattoir plan

GURGAON: Saffron warriors, animal rights activists one of them from Armenia and environmentalists jumped in to protest MCG's plan to open a slaughterhouse in Gurgaon's Sector 37. Some of the protesters were students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Swami Agnivesh joined the protests, claiming the opening of the slaughterhouse was actually a diabolical ploy to slaughter cows on the sly."It may not be permissible to slaughter cows but when the abattoir is opened, they may start doing it. And we will have no authority to inspect the premises and stop the practice of cow slaughter if started," he claimed.
The imaginary slaughter of cows in the future was indeed the trigger of the protests in front of the city's mini secretariat on Thursday. And, it was the saffron brigade which started the protests by shouting slogans against the civic body. Once the protests had gathered momentum, JNU students joined in the abattoir-bashing. Karen Mkrtchyan, a student from Armenia, doing his Master's in German at JNU, said, "By opening a slaughterhouse, we are pushing animal rights 10 steps backwards. There are some animals which are treated well when they are domesticated. At the same time, there are other animals which are killed in a cruel way in slaughterhouses. It's gross discrimination between two species of animals." Environmental concerns were raised by some others.
Ekta Kindhway, who is a member of the JNU Animal Rights Group, said, "There is a huge water crisis in the city. And they are set to open a slaughterhouse which will require huge amounts of natural resource. In slaughterhouses at Meerut, the groundwater has blood in it. We don't want the same thing to happen here as well."
MCG was at pains to explain that not only was there any covert plan to slaughter cows (which is illegal in Haryana), but also that the abattoir wouldn't pose an environmental hazard. "It will be totally modernized. And we will have a treatment plant for water that will be used to clean animals. This water will be recycled too. We will dispose of waste as per norms of the pollution control board," a senior MCG official said.