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Like most indigenous groups of Brazil, for the Apinajé, the elements of "nature" (above all animals) are never learned as being unique or isolated, but as participants in a chain of relations that involves at the same time both humans and non-humans and non-humans amongst themselves. In this sense, hunting means interacting with symbolic forces of nature, for every game animal possesses a particular subjectivity (a "spirit" which defines the "character" of a specific animal species) that makes the relation of predator and prey a relation between subjects.

Mythology also emphasizes the "humanity" of the animals, given that "before, all the animals could talk", as they say; the animals are seen as ex-humans, on this point, the indigenous view differs radically from the cosmology of the so-called Western society, for whom the "common" condition among humans and animals is "animality" (we are rational animals).

In the Timbira view, the spirits of dead humans (carõ) undergo a series of metamorphoses, involving the use of the bodies of animals and plants as avatar, and in a regressive manner (from the higher mammals to the insects; from cultivated plants to "rotten wood", to finally be transformed into stone, thus no longer being able to communicate with the living). Besides revealing the Timbira view of the hierarchy implicit in the natural order, these metamorphoses indicate that, under the skin of a natural entity, the carõ can establish contact with humans, a contact that is always dangerous (it can lead to sickness and death) and which provides the subject who is contacted (if he accepts the terms "offered" by the carõ) the possibility of becoming a shaman (wajaka), thereby acquiring the power to maintain a permanent line of communication with the "other side" and the power to cure.

Besides that, the natural world is peopled by "guardian spirits" of the species; these are unnamed agents (the ijãxycatê, the "owner" of the brocket deer, for example) which become manifest in the clothes of an individual species with some outstanding characteristic (size, strength, cleverness etc.). The "spirit guardians" communicate with the humans in dreams or in the liminal states that a subject passes through (sickness, seclusion), sending messages about the state of his "herd". For example, there are many stories in which in order to kill a certain type of game with frequency, the hunter begins to feel bad, becoming sick; soon after, there appears before him the ikraricatê saying that, if he wishes to recover, he should from then on refrain from killing that type of game and even from eating its meat. In this way, the "guardian spirit" regulates the stock of the species that it protects, acting as a kind of vector for the management and control of these stocks.