Do Horses Cry? (Boo Hoo!)

The answer is no, horses do not cry. You will see tears fall out of their eyes, but they do not cry in the traditional, emotional sense. When you see a horse shedding tears it is likely they have a blocked tear duct or some other irritant in their eye.

Of course, this does not mean that horses have no feelings.

Many owners have witnessed their horses comfort and grieve with one another.

We will cover all the ways horses express emotions as well as what could make their eyes appear to tear.

What makes a horse shed tears?

One of the sources of tears we already mentioned: blocked tear ducts.

The main function of tears is to keep eyes wet.

Tear ducts are designed to drain the excess fluid so that we do not have streams of tears running down our faces all day long.

The same is true for horses and tear ducts.

So when a tear duct is blocked, there is nowhere for the tears to go.

This is one of the times you might see a horse appear to cry.

Also very similar to humans, horses can get dust and other irritants in their eyes.

If you have been to a barn and inside the stables, you know it can get very dusty.

Not to mention horses are usually munching on hay all day long!

When something gets stuck in their big eyes, the easiest way to get it out is to flush it with tears, again looking like a horse could be crying.

Even more serious, those irritants or other injuries around the eyes could cause infections.

This will typically cause an eye to swell and tear.

Lastly are the horse’s constant pest, flies.

A horse can stand all day twitching its skin, stomping its feet and swishing its tail to keep flies at bay.

When flies land on or near a horse’s eyes, this too could cause tearing, and infections.

Do horses have feelings?

It is hard to quantify and categorize all the things horse owners believe point to their horses having emotions.

Since they can’t tell us what they are feeling, we are left to interpret horses’ behavior and assign different signals to emotions we believe they experience.

People who spend lots of time with horses, particularly people who get to know a specific horse or group of horses well, definitely insist that horses experience emotions.

Some of the data we have on the noises horses will make when they are stressed or happy do seem to support this impassioned stance of horse lovers.

What science does support with data, however, is that horses do seem to be able to identify emotions in humans and respond to them.

Horses can distinguish between faces that are angry or happy.

Even more surprising horses can sense the heart rate of humans around them, and their own heart rates can increase to match.

When human riders have become nervous it seems from these experiments that their horse’s temperaments have matched.

Do horses grieve?

One of the strongest displays of human emotion is often grief.

Horses are not dissimilar in this respect either.

Advice has carried from horse experts for generations: when a horse dies, let the remaining horses spend time with it.

Horses are social animals and owners often notice a change in behavior, ranging from energy levels to appetite, when their companion horse passes away.

Experts and longtime owners tend to agree that it seems like horses that get to spend time near their deceased companion have an easier time adapting to life without them.

Horse lovers speculate that being able to see their fellow horse, to sniff them and understand they are gone, makes it easier than a member of the herd inexplicably never coming out to the field again.

It is not a guarantee, and sometimes a horse seems heartbroken no matter how much time they get to spend with a herdmate’s body, but the stories abound.

Horse owners believe their horses grieve, in their own way.

Do horses comfort each other?

Horses definitely show affection for each other.

You can see this when they stand side-by-side and mutually groom each other, or nuzzle and nudge each other.

You may also catch horses “head hugging” here they drape a neck over each other, generally thought to show affection.

You might also see horses “sharing air” where they touch noses and breathe in and out together, passing their air and scent back and forth.

Horses even engage in the simplest of physical comforts; you may see horses leaning against each other.

This almost certainly means they share a strong bond, as horses spend a lot of time establishing their space and boundaries within a herd.

Do horses comfort their owners?

Horses provide intense comfort for their owners or the humans they have bonded with.

Whether they do this intentionally is a deeper question.

Therapy horses are big, nonverbal, nonjudgmental beings that often connect with humans in ways that our language can’t.

Working with horses gives children, patients, and even prison inmates a level of confidence they didn’t know they had.

Horses also create deep bonds with humans who put the time in.

Stories abound of horses who only behave for their former owner, horses who become a different and happy animal when their favorite person returns, horses who just aren’t understood by anyone else.

These are hard to prove in a laboratory, and the cause and effect may always be a mystery.

But for as much as people give to horses, they can get even more in return.