British animal rights activists are angry following reports that Prince William used a 7ft spear to kill a small antelope during his holiday in Kenya.

One London newspaper said on Sunday the Prince crept up behind the 14-inch-high dik-dik during a hunting trip last week after taking lessons from a Masai warrior.

Royal sources insisted that the story was not true. A St James's Palace spokesman said: "We do not comment on the Prince's private life."

William, 21, is spending a month in east Africa with seven friends.

A tribal Masai leader is quoted as telling how William 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."

"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. Princess Diana abstained from it all. Why can't he be the same?" British writer Carla Lane, a critic of blood sports, asked on Sunday.

Jonathan Owen, spokesman for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, an international charity campaigning for animal welfare, said, "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 they like to watch animals in the wild, not try to take them out of circulation."