Australian Aboriginal totemism is a form of animism as Graham Harvey has eloquently defined the term: the understanding “that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others” (2006a: xi). In addition to being persons, many non-humans are kin. The complexity of Aboriginal kinship systems is well known, and the fact that they include non-humans as well as humans is a further aspect of their complexity. Cross-cutting categories of kin groups generate a system of looped, entangled and enduring moral bonds of care, responsibility, accountability and exchange. In the midst of all this kinship, personhood and responsibility, how can anything be killed? How do people in a kin-based ecology understand and manage their participation in the deaths of animals?

In this reflective essay I address two aspects of what I take to be one of the major issues confronting the world at this time: anthropogenic extinctions. The first aspect is an analysis of totemic groups among the Aboriginal people of the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia where I have been carrying out research for thirty years. (Much of the ethnographic analysis I present here has been developed in greater depth in a number of publications that include: D. Rose 1996, 2005a, 2009a,b, 2011.) I aim to engage with multi-species kin groups in their organization of responsibility and accountability in relation to animal life and death. The analysis engages with both ethical and unethical killing.