The benefits of the cow have been a huge matter in the public domain for a while now. While many advocates of the preservation of cows and the non-consumption of beef have been coming up with various reasons why cows should not be killed, the opposing section has had very little going in their favour apart from the fact that it tastes good.
In 2019, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat made claims that the cow is the only animal to exhale oxygen and so is a very important part of our ecosystem. This vital link in maintaining the balance of nature needs to be sustained and hence cow slaughter should be banned across the country. He also went on to equate the cow to be like a mother and so needs to be addressed as mata. The Uttarakhand government went ahead and also declared that the cow should be awarded the title of mother of the nation.
This was not a one-off incident of politicians making scientific claims. Trivendra  Singh Rawat, in the same speech, had gone ahead and also claimed that cow dung and cow urine (gomuthra) are also capable of curing ailments of the heart and kidney. The mere presence of a cow was also deemed to help cure Tuberculosis and improve general health by the Chief Minister. Trivendra Singh Rawat was not the first to claim that cows exhale oxygen. In 2017, the BJP education minister for Rajasthan had also made similar claims.
Other politicians who have made similar claims include BJP MP from Nainital, Ajay Bhatt, claiming that women can avoid cesarean delivery if they drink water from a particular river. Another BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur had claimed that cow urine helped her cure her cancer and that rubbing a cow in a particular way helped keep her blood pressure under control.
The whole debate of the actual scientific benefits of the cow has been pulled into the limelight once again by the Allahabad High Court.
Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav of the Allahabad High Court, yesterday, in a 12 page ruling against the bail application of a person accused of cow slaughter repeated the claim that cows exhale oxygen. The judge who had previously ruled that the cow should be the national animal of India also remarked that the use of ghee in yagnas were used to give special powers to the sun rays during a pooja, which ultimately causes rain.
He also put forward the medical benefits of panchgavya (a five-part mixture of cow urine, dung, ghee, milk and curd) for the cure of most incurable diseases. In his judgement, he also quoted Jesus Christ as saying that killing a cow is equivalent to killing a human being. He ended the judgement by saying that the Right to Life precedes the Right to Kill and the right to eat beef cannot be considered a fundamental right.
This episode is also available as a blog post: http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/09/03/cow-tears-can-trigger-nuclear-reaction-better-than-plutonium-claims-bovine-expert/