Pivoted in Al-Daqahliyya governorate on the Nile’s Delta in Egypt, my broader project explores animal rearing practices among women farmers and its emotional valences of caring, killing, and eating. A key intervention of this project is proposing tarbiyya as a conceptual tool to understanding human-animal relations in the Middle East. Commonly used to refer to rearing animals for food but also rearing human children, tarbiyya is an Arabic word that exposes the nurturing and disciplining components of relating to specific nonhuman animals. Alongside tarbiyya and its derivative adjectives, the lack of tarbiyya describes someone who is immoral, undisciplined, rude, or indecent. An etymological exploration of tarbiyya exposes its root as “r b y”, which is also the root of the word Rabb, God. In this particular rendition of the word, Rabb refers to an overpowering, omnipotent, all-knowing entity. In light of these reflections, this essay explores anti-tarbiyya as a mode of (unGodly) relating, gesturing towards a mode of relationality that begins with unknowability and relies on play, experimentation, and indifference as means for engaging with one’s surroundings of humans, visible and invisible nonhumans. In beginning with unknowability and acknowledging our limits as humans, anti-tarbiyya explores relationality in an intransitive sense that is not necessarily limited to specific animals reared for specific ends such as food. Unlike tarbiyya, anti-tarbiyya operates within an expansive horizon of beings with whom we experiment, play, and engage with, oftentimes violently. This essay thus centers on children (interlocutors) & their unrestricted, oftentimes violent, and passionate playful engagement with animals such as goats, chickens, bees, stray cats and dogs, birds, and worms. These engagements do not follow a fixed script: Children can play with worms, kill them, or “hunt” insects in early mornings. They try to know these more-than-humans but often fail to do so in full. More importantly, they do not begin with a quest for fully knowing or disciplining these more-than-humans. Drawing on Bateson and Hamayon’s understandings of play as a process and modality of action that is characterized by a reciprocal interaction with and relationship to alterity we can engage with new dimensions of activity and rethink old concepts. In this light, field-sites unfold play-sites; spaces of experimentation, imagination, and play. I use these reflections to argue that play offers a useful entry point to complicating the human-animal relation in Egypt beyond the calculative and fixed scripts of food, its provisioning, and eating.