In recent years, a demand for veterinary care focussing on terminally ill patients has been recognized. Rather than focussing on curing the animal patient, palliative care aims to achieve an animal’s best quality of life regardless of disease outcome and to provide guidance to the animal’s owners. Animal hospice can be described as a specialized form of a palliative care that cares for patients in the end stages of an illness, near death. In this paper we will first illustrate to what extent the status of the animal patient as well as prevailing veterinary aims and norms change in this specific working environment, which ultimately results in a shift of a veterinarian’s self-understanding from the ‘curing’ to the ‘caring’ professional. In a second step, we will present and discuss four aspects within a veterinarian’s working life – relationships, time, communication, and infrastructure – that evolve during animal hospice and palliative care work. In a final section, we will provide a brief outlook on how these theoretical considerations and developed hypotheses will be empirically investigated in a future research project.