In scholarly and popular accounts alike, Islamic ethics of animal care – from practices of halal slaughter to beliefs about animals’ cosmological place in the world – are often framed through established traditions of Islamic law, history, and theology. Yet, as environmental crises arise, animal populations dwindle and grow, and sociocultural norms of animal care change over time, interacting with animals demands a continuous redrawing of these ethical reference points. In other words, living with animals requires a flexible and experimental engagement with Islam to navigate a variety of uncertain encounters with non-human others. Drawing on ethnographic work on human-animal relations in Jordan, I examine Islamic animal ethics through three stories of human-animal encounter. First, I examine debates about human-dog relations by following a series of fatwas that emerged in 2018-19 in response to changes in stray dog management in Amman. I trace the ways in which governmental officials, political figures, and Ammani residents use competing sources of religious authority to argue for or against the sterilization and culling of stray dogs. Second, I follow the discourses and practices of hunters tasked with eliminating invasive wild boar populations in the Jordan Valley. I show that ethics concerning methods and modes of killing boar, and religious protocols of bodily comportment around boar corpses, must be improvised and renegotiated on a minute-to-minute level. And third, I show how the Jordanian staff of British animal welfare organizations weave Islamic ethics into the liberal-secular programming of the NGOs they work for. Drawing on Qur’anic verse, hadith, and Islamic juridical debates, they impart the message that compassion for animals not only helps animals, but also helps Muslims become better Muslims. Taken together, these examples challenge everyday forms of animal engagement: they involve problematic animals like dogs and pigs, and question the normative standards of animal care in Jordan. But I suggest that because they are challenging in this way, these examples also provide an inroad for understanding the ways in which Islamic animal ethics of care are shaped by experimentality and uncertainty. How is uncertain care for animals practiced? And what might this reveal about everyday Islamic ethics in Jordan? Building on scholarship on Islam and care (e.g., Hamdy 2012, Mittermaier 2019), this paper argues that Islamic animal ethics are just as much forged in the spontaneous, improvised, and often uncertain responses to human-animal relationships as they are an established set of protocols and beliefs.