Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said today his government will not allow opening of abattoirs in the state and will cancel licences for those issued by the previous regime.

Reiterating his government's commitment to cow conservation, Rawat said Uttarakhand is the first state where special police squads have been raised in Dehradun, Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar districts to stop cow slaughter and cow trafficking. "We will not allow opening slaughterhouses in the state. Those issued by previous governments will be cancelled," Rawat said at a function held here to mark signing of an MoU with a US firm to produce sex-sorted semen to increase the population of cows.