Drawing on fieldwork in summers of 2021 and 2022 in a rural village located in Al-Daqahliyya governorate on the Nile’s Delta in Upper Egypt, this essay asks: What kind of hospitality is offered to animals and humans in rural Egypt and what are the scripts of hospitality undergirding these relations? Which humans and animals count as guests, intruders, or hostages? In this town, just like almost every other town on the Nile’s Delta, women farmers rear, care for, kill, sell, and eat animals on rooftops or in their courtyards. I put in conversation three ethnographic instances involving humans, animals, & researchers and different traditions/theologies of hospitality to argue that hospitality is a useful analytic that exposes the species and groups of humans that count as guests to be welcomed or unwelcomed and those held hostage or host(il)ed for various ends. In one instance, security officers and policemen regarded themselves as hosts protecting a sovereign home/nation that offers shelter to a foreign researcher, while expecting a local/native ethnographer (myself) to seek permission before stepping in that territory. In this view, hosts contain guests who in turn acquiesce to restrictions on movement. In another instance, hospitality unfolds as an expansion of selves through a playful negotiation with alterity in a familial ethnographer-interlocutor setting. Fraught with inconsistencies and negotiations, this ethnographic encounter necessitates a continuous rewriting of scripts of hospitality beyond idioms of containment and performative courtesies of kinship. In this view, hospitality offered for ethnography rather than/before kinship offers a more flexible frame in which a sovereign host and a familial guest are in constant negotiation. In the last instance, offering shelter and food to courtyard animals only appears as hospitality but is closer to hostility since animals are only sheltered and fed to be killed, eaten, or served as tokens of hospitality to other (human) guests. While hospitality is an inevitable condition of ethnographic research, I suggest a closer focus on scripts of hospitality and deviations thereof as pointers towards a gradation of hospitality and hostility. In this sense, it matters to which humans or animals hos(ti)pitality is offered. As such, who counts as guest, host, or neither demarcates boundaries of hospitality, hostility, and homes. Rather than a fixity on transformations, I suggest a focus on movement, visitations, and flexible/cautious openness to alterity as generative to attending to fraught relations in fraught contexts of security, killing, and eating.