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This made me think of a related question: Do our primate relatives also cry when sad?
Turns out no, they do not! Humans are the only animal that sheds tears. We are unique and sometimes sad snowflakes 😢
Humans are not the only animal that sheds tears. Note they specify emotional tearing is considered uniquely human but do not specify tearing as uniquely human. Plus they studied tears in mice as stated in the beginning of the abstract.
Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1198331
Abstract
Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men.
If I remember correctly, elephants do something much like crying when they're sad, not identical, but quite similar.
I wonder how thoroughly that's been explored - definitely have some contradicting anecdote. Used to have pet dogs that fucking adored each other, and when one died, the other become noticeably depressed, to include constant tears. I mean maybe it was just an oddly timed eye infection or something, but it sure looked related to the other's death.
The reasoning behind a lot of "only humans do that" is that it's unexplored.
A cursory search reveals that many other animals shed tears.
As a means of clearing debris, or specifically as an emotional response?
Both, but verifyng an emotional response in an animal is probably difficult to prove scientifically.