Palace denies report of William killing antelope

The Mail on Sunday said the prince crept up behind the 14in dik-dik during a hunting trip last week after taking lessons from a Masai warrior.

Royal sources yesterday said the story was not true.

A St James’s Palace spokesman said: "We do not comment on the Prince’s private life."

Prince William, 21, is spending a month in east Africa with seven friends. Legei, the tribal village’s Masai leader, told the newspaper that the prince experimented with the spear - made from acacia wood and fashioned with a metal tip - by targeting tree trunks in a village clearing.

He said: "Then we took him out hunting and he crept up like we do on the first prey he saw, a fully grown dik-dik.

"Using the Masai’s silent approach, he followed it, took aim and speared it in one go.

"I was proud of him. He picked it up by the tail and presented it to me. At home we eat such animals but I don’t think Prince William would even consider it."

Writer Carla Lane, a high profile critic of blood sports, said: "If this is right it is appalling and depressing. I had hoped that with this young man we might have had a monarch who was not cruel. Diana abstained from it all, why can’t he be the same?

"The majority of people in this country will oppose what he is said to have done - do our views matter at all to our future king?"

Jonathan Owen, a spokesman for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, an international charity campaigning for animal welfare, said: "We only know what we have been told about this by the press, but one’s first thought is - why would somebody feel the need to kill an animal while on holiday, and why do it in a way which has a very high chance of being quite inhumane.

"Spearing an animal is a crude way of killing it, and not guaranteed to kill the animal quickly, if someone is not an expert spearman.

"We have hundreds of thousands of members, and when they go on holiday they like to watch animals in the wild, not try to take them out of circulation."