Sanitary Work in the Smaller Towns and in Villages (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II.?SLAUGHTER-HOUSES. The positions of slaughter-houses in rural sanitary districts are generally such as to cause a nuisance. They are mostly behind the butchers' shops, and these are necessarily in the thickly populated parts of the district, and in these parts the ground is in most cases as thickly built upon, for some considerable distance round the slaughter-house, as it is in many large towns. The position behind the butcher's shop is, however, preferable to one which is open to the street, as some slaughter-houses are, and which are both slaughterhouse and shop in one. In the case of a slaughterhouse in the back premises of the shop (which, by the bye, is in most cases part of the dwelling-house) the objection due to its position is often doubled by its bad structural condition. This is wholly unnecessary and unwarrantable. In addition to this, notwithstanding that the spaces are so small and confined, the nuisance is often increased by keeping pigs to eat up the offal, which is the system of disposing of it, and no regular means of removal are adopted for disposing of that which the pigs do not eat, which is thrown on to the manure heap, exposed to the sun and atmosphere; whereas if the system were to keep no pigs on the premises, but to remove all the offal to a field where they might be kept, then all the offal would be removed together, as a rule of the business, and the premises would be rid of both offal and pigs. This is the practicein some individual cases, and it should be enforced where necessary, in all cases, on sanitary grounds. This being done, nuisance arising from the structural defects of slaughter-houses may be abated by the following means. The first requisite is that a sufficient quantity of water shall be close at hand. Some trials to ascertain ...