Animal Tears

Kimberly Drake

Scripps College

I was taught not to cry by my father, who was taught not to cry by his father. My tears disturbed my father, especially when he had caused them. When he would smack me in rage, I would cry in pain and shock, but then I would flee to my room, wipe my eyes, and grab one of my Nancy Drew mysteries, furiously reading until I felt calmer. Nancy never cries, although in every book, she is beaten and almost killed by men she doesn’t know. She is never hit by her father. 

According to one of the world’s foremost experts on crying, Dr. Ad Vingerhoets, “we cry because we need other people.” Emotional crying is an evolutionary advancement in humans. It’s an outward sign of vulnerability that creates empathy in others. Emotional tears are neurologically and chemically different from “reflex” tears. They are also more viscous. Dr. Vingergoets believes the viscosity helps them stay on the human face longer, extending the likelihood that another human seeing the tears will involuntarily diffuse all aggression, turning a slap into a caress. He states this in his 2013 book, Why Only Humans Weep. All other theories about crying are wrong, according to this psychologist whose book title, it turns out, is overconfident. 

I wonder about the childhood of Dr. Vingergoets in the Netherlands, seemingly a place without bullies or murderers unmoved by tearful pleas. I wonder about his knowledge of human history. In non-Netherlands regions, rage beats empathy. Tears provoke violence. Nancy Drew’s tearlessness suggests that even when in tremendous pain, in fear of her life, she knows not to count on empathy from her foes. Nancy’s mother died when Nancy was three, and no amount of crying could bring her back. Does that explain Nancy’s brilliance and invulnerability? Is she more evolved, or less?

Until this past year, the relatively small international group of scholars studying crying agreed that emotional crying is universal in humans and only occurs in humans. In the early 1980s, crying expert Dr. William H. Frey surveyed breeders, zoologists, and other handlers of animals as well as pet owners to answer the question of whether animals cry emotionally. He received many replies but no proof (he requested videotapes) of emotional tears in animals—perhaps because no one in that pre-internet age wanted to tape themselves making animals cry. The strength of the anecdotal evidence, though, forced him to concede that “the process of emotional tearing may have also evolved in animals other than humans.”

One of those anecdotes was reported by Charles Darwin: a reliable (i.e. white aristocratic) witness observed captured and bound elephants crying “incessantly.” Another anecdote highlights the “red tears” secreted from the Harderian (not the lachrymal) gland in the eyes of lab rats and farmed pigs during times of great stress, a report that was confirmed in a 2016 study. Writing in 2009, Dr. Juan Murube notes that “psycho-emotional weeping is the manifestation of an underlying brain activity that requires specific connections to the cortex and lacrimatory nucleus.” Humans have developed this connection, he states, but it may not have developed in other animals, “supposedly because they did not need it.” Why not? If even a small number of humans use emotional tears to ward off harm by other humans, why wouldn’t animals cry to protect themselves from humans as well? 

In 2013, I adopted a 6-year-old golden retriever, Roxie, who had been physically abused by the father of her previous human family. Roxie’s human teenage sister brought her to a shelter and said to the staff, “Things are bad at home and Roxie can’t stay there anymore.” Roxie showed symptoms of deep trauma. When not standing with her furry arms squeezing my waist, she hung her head down to the ground and narrowed her eyes until they were almost closed. The few times I tried to get her to fetch a toy, she would run after it but then sit down abruptly and whimper like a frightened toddler, her back to me. 

When did homo sapiens begin shedding emotional tears? Before they could weep, humans yelled, screamed, and moaned like other nonhuman animals who become separated from their colleagues or feel overwhelmed by life. Dr. Asmir Gračanin, another of the tight global group of crying specialists, speculates that as humans developed their “hyper-expressive faces” over the centuries, their eye socket muscles could have evolved as well. These muscles could have “squeezed the corneal sensory nerves that trigger the production of tears by the lachrymal gland and proved advantageous to human babies as a call for immediate help.” Charles Darwin scientifically observed “one of [his] own infants” having a “screaming fit” and postulated in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) that humans and some other species also contract their eye muscles when screaming in distress—noting that this doesn’t automatically produce tears. Perhaps some non-human animals developed the ability to trigger the production of tears as a “call for immediate help” to their animal colleagues. Since there is so little evidence of animals crying emotional tears, they may refrain from crying around humans because they have learned that it’s pointless. 

Roxie weeps occasionally while eating or licking peanut butter. Tears roll down her furry face, sometimes from one eye, sometimes from both eyes. On those occasions, she comes to find me after finishing her food so that I can wipe her tears away. They are viscous tears, the kind Dr. Vingergoets thinks only humans produce. He might argue that these tears are simply a reflex of her chewing motion, but she might counterargue that licking and eating in a safe space produces serotonin and oxytocin, just as do emotional tears. Maybe her licking produces such an excess of these neurotransmitters that they must exit her body through her tear ducts. Or maybe she has evolved.  

When my mother died of metastatic lung cancer in 2003, I cried, of course. But not rolling viscous tears. I wailed, I screamed. My connection to the earth had been severed. I felt ungrounded. Tears didn’t roll down my cheeks; they burned in my eyelids. Initially, I was furious with my mother’s HMO-assigned doctors for the repeated mistakes they had made during her 20-month struggle with cancer. I also blamed myself for not saving her life, although I researched the hell out of cancer. Directing my rage at medical incompetence provided some relief from my pain, but six months later, when my doctor explained to me that no doctor could have saved my mother, my rage turned into major depression accompanied by continuous emotional tears. I didn’t know how to grieve.

During my cancer research, I learned that unresolved trauma in one’s early life can incite some cells to grow uncontrollably. My mom was an expert suppressor of trauma, and in her teens and early twenties, she had suffered some major losses, including a stillbirth and the violent death of her second husband. She had been the victim of her first husband’s alcoholic abuse. She had lived for 38 years with a rage-filled third husband who regularly insulted her in the presence of his children. My mother cried before and during her terminal illness, but it didn’t help anyone behave better.

In 2002, while my mom was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, I adopted my first dog, a golden retriever named Sunny. It was not possible for Sunny to meet my mom, but I taped a photo of Sunny to the wall of my mom’s bedroom so that she could see that I had someone caring for me. On the rare occasions that I cried, Sunny could sense my tears before I felt them; she would silently appear at my side, looking anxiously into my face and putting her head on my knee. After my mom’s passing, Sunny could not help me with my agony, and when my anger gave way to debilitating tearful depression, I had to go on medication. 

About a decade ago, the top researchers of crying, including Dr. Vingerhoets, conducted a study in which “25 healthy young females” tested the efficacy of a drug called paroxetine, hypothesized to reduce crying. They gave half of the subjects paroxetine and the other half a placebo and asked them to watch one of two “emotional movies,” Once Were Warriors (1994) and Brian’s Song (1971), and then assess their crying. The results confirmed the hypothesis: during both films, those taking paroxetine cried significantly less. The researchers are not sure how paroxetine works but believe it affects the physiological processes of crying, rather than mood. The age range of the sample, 18-27, reflects the implied fertility of the subjects; fertile young women are apparently most likely to cry. To exclude other variables, the 25 subjects were free of all medication apart from birth control. Both movies focus on men engaged in destructive violence: Brian’s Song about a pair of pro football players and Once Were Warriors about a violent Maori patriarch and his family. Both touch on the ways that white supremacy has distorted the lives of and relationships among the characters; both include scenes of trauma to protagonists who ultimately die tragically. 

I picture myself needing the equivalent of 100 Euros during college and participating in this study. At that time, I had not yet been diagnosed with any of my several anxiety disorders, including PTSD, so I was free of medication—except birth control, just like the sample. I would have been considered “healthy” because I was not on psychiatric medication. Would I have cried during a showing of either movie to 11 or 12 other “healthy females”? If I had guessed that I was participating in a study of my emotional reactions to the movies, I would have suppressed my tears. 

Perhaps I’m wrong about that. I clearly recall watching The Champ (1979) on TV in 1980, when I was 15, at my peak of adolescent self-hatred. A classmate had announced to my theater class that this Franco Zeffirelli movie would totally make us cry, so I decided to test that theory. The Champ is a remake of a 1930s “weepie” about an abusive and self-destructive boxer and his devoted young son. In 1988, two psychology researchers at UC Berkeley, which I was attending at the time, ran tests on 500 volunteers and found that the last three minutes of The Champ were the most successful at evoking sadness of any of the 250+ films they screened. It has since been used in many studies of sadness and has been cited well over 300 times in scientific literature. I watched this film by myself. I didn’t cry when the boxer hit his son or abused his ex-wife, but I sobbed uncontrollably during those last three minutes, when the boxer dies, his son at his bedside. I recall feeling ashamed of this loss of self-control.

In fall of 2012, my dog Sunny developed some kind of terrible disorder that eventually rendered her paralyzed. It first manifested a month after one of my more devastating breakups, which she witnessed with pacing and cowering. Her disease moved quickly, each new symptom a blow. Whenever I began to cry about her condition, she would look into my eyes and tremble violently. Was this her version of tears? Charles Darwin theorized that when tears are restrained by a crier, “it is almost impossible to prevent the various muscles” involved in crying from “trembling.” Trembling is a sign of pain as well as fear in dogs. Sunny never cried, but she trembled, and I could not bear to see it. I refrained from crying in front of her during the next few months as her motor functions declined. I cried quietly every morning in the shower to get it out of the way. When I updated tearful friends and fans about her condition in front of her, I did so with a sing-song voice and a smile. Other people’s tears didn’t cause the trembling, only mine. During those terrible last moments in the vet’s office, I looked directly into her eyes and smiled and told her that I loved her and that she was going to feel much better. When the vet said “she’s gone,” I collapsed. I was picked up and escorted from the room by a good friend of ours, a former member of the Navy Ceremonial Guard whose tearlessness had been violently trained into him.

Earlier this year, Professor Takefumi Kikusui, working in a lab in Japan that studies human-animal interaction and reciprocity, found that “dogs shed tears associated with positive emotions” such as reuniting with their owners or nursing their puppies. The researchers didn’t find out whether dogs cried from negative emotions, perhaps also because that would have forced them to make dogs cry in fear or pain. They did, however, determine that humans felt more attached to crying dogs. They did so by showing 74 people photos of dog’s faces, some of which had artificial tears in their eyes, and asking them to rank the dogs. Perhaps the “fittest” dogs are those that can manipulate human emotions with their tears.

My father didn’t cry along with the rest of us at my mother’s memorial service. He spoke about her in front of well over a hundred mourners with ease, smiling wryly when appropriate, and telling stories designed to elicit laughter and tears. His own lack of tears surprised no one. A decade later, while I was at his apartment restoring his computer to functionality, he abruptly confessed, “I have always thought I caused your mom’s cancer when the business failed and we lost the house.” I froze. I recalled a moment from the late 1990s: my pale, exhausted mom telling me that when my dad began scrambling to raise money by mortgaging our home and his mother’s, he told her not to tell anyone what was happening. She kept his secret for three years, until the bank took the homes and we all found out. Hearing that my dad shared my theory about who was to blame for her cancer startled me. But I knew instantly that my mother would want me to refute it. “Dad,” I said, turning from the computer to face him, “even if cancer is caused by suppressed trauma, Mom had much worse trauma in her past than the business failing.” My dad’s half-smile suggested that he was relieved by my lie, but I wasn’t. Neither of us cried. 

It turns out that not being able to cry can cause cancer as well. I am concerned about this because in my post-middle age, when I feel upset or emotional, my eye muscles contract and my mouth contorts like a Greek tragedy mask, but no tears roll down my cheeks. Have I exhausted my supply? Dr. Vingergoets says this is impossible in humans. His colleague Dr. Gračanin reminds us of catharsis, the relief after releasing strong emotions by “crying, swearing, or aggressive acts.” If we don’t adequately release this emotional energy, it might “convert into a variety of psychological and even physical health problems.” This catharsis hypothesis goes all the way back to Freud and his colleague Breuer in 1895, so it’s as suspect as some of Darwin’s, but probably true. It’s certainly not as suspect as the idea that only humans cry.

Last year, I adopted a “career-change” Guide Dog, Wicker. He’s a young black Lab, just like our family dog Bart, who we all knew to be my dad’s favorite child during his 14 years of life. When I first brought Wicker to meet my dad, Wicker broke free of my hold and ran to the couch where my dad was sitting. It was mutual love at first sight, although I didn’t recognize it initially. I watched my dad’s eyes squint and his mouth open in a silent scream, a face that I had never seen him make. For a few seconds I froze in alarm, until I realized that this was a face of pure joy. My dad laughed and put his head down between his legs so that Wicker could lick his entire face and head, which became a regular greeting between them. And Wicker loved his “Grand,” so nicknamed by my sister’s human children. “Wanna go see Grand? I would ask, and Wicker would dance in circles. “Wicker is a beautiful animal,” my dad would frequently pronounce, patting Wicker proudly. “Even more beautiful than Bart was. Look at those eyes!” When my dad would become irritated with me for not helping him with his computer or picking up his groceries, I would drive over with Wicker, whose leaping and cavorting in the doorway always deflated Grand’s anger. My friend who is a Guide Dog puppy raiser told me that Guide Dogs are trained to go to the most vulnerable person in the room. I would have thought that vulnerable person was me.

Two months ago, in November, my 87-year-old dad was hospitalized with stroke symptoms. I brought him photos of Wicker and our family to keep him grounded, because the past few hospital stays had induced delirium. This time was no different. I visited him every day on my way to or from work, and I would explain to him that he had not been stuck in a mall, or in the post office, or down a dirt road without a car. One day, he told me tentatively that he thought he had been kidnapped and placed high on a ladder at the back of a semi-truck the previous night. He had been calling for help, he said, but no one would help him. 

“Was I one of the kidnappers?” I asked with a smile. 

“Yeah, you were in there,” he responded. 

“You’ve been in the hospital the whole time, Dad. You just had hospital brain.” 

“Oh,” he said. “I think I might owe some people an apology.” Then he burst into tears. He sobbed with abandon, milky tears streaming down his cheeks and pooling in the hollows under his eyes, chest heaving. I blotted his eyes with tissues and squeezed his arm, saying “it’s okay, Dad, no one is upset at you.” He sobbed for several more minutes, a lifetime of tears finally released. I reassured him that I would see him every day and would not let anything happen to him. “You’ll recover and be home in a couple of weeks,” I said with certainty. “You’ve beaten much worse conditions than this.” But I was wrong. He died unexpectedly of pneumonia a few days later. Wicker was by my side when a hospital doctor told me the news over the phone. He snuggled down next to me on the floor, where I had collapsed in shock. 

I still don’t know what to do with my own tears. They are pooled in my chest, boiling up into my eyes when I look through my dad’s papers or speed past his freeway exit but then evaporating, pulling my features into a tragedy grimace. My grief mostly takes the form of a stabbing blow or a stinging slap. An image of my dad crying flits into my mind and I double over, raging at the doctors and nurses who let him die and at myself for not saving him. The person who hurt me the most is gone, but his absence hurts me even more. I know my dad would want me to cry, but he didn’t show me how until it was too late.

About the Author

Kimberly Drake teaches writing and literature at Scripps College, where she is Professor of Writing, Chair of the Writing and Rhetoric Department, and Director of the Writing Program. She has taught writing workshops and Inside-Out courses in Southern California prisons and at Crossroads Transitional Facility for Women for 15 years. Her scholarly interests lie in protest and social justice writing and rhetorics, specifically disability, incarceration, race, class, gender, and sexuality; she also studies these topics as they impact writing pedagogy. Recent publications include “The Tide that Takes You Out of Prison’: Linguistic Justice in a Prison Writing Center,” forthcoming in The Peer Review (coauthored with Damian Busby) and “Wildfire Season and Pedagogical Interventions: West Coast Crises” in Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching in Emergencies, Peter Lang 2022.