A trophy hunting convention in the US is auctioning off a week-long “dream hunt” with the US president’s son Donald Trump Jr.
The four-day event described on its website as a “hunters’ heaven” that has "everything the mind can dream of" will culminate on Saturday with an auction for a week-long Sitka black-tailed deer hunt in Alaska with Trump Jr, his son and a guide with the bidding standing at $10,000 (€9,062).
The annual convention organised by the hunting group Safari Club International also auctioned off expeditions to shoot elephants, bears and giraffes with prizes including the chance to shoot an elephant on a 14-day trip in Namibia, an all-inclusive hunt package to Zimbabwe to kill buffalo, giraffe and wildebeest, and a 10-day crocodile hunting expedition in South Africa.
The Guardian reported that thousands of hunters from around the world are expected to attend the convention which begins on Wednesday.
It comes after ProPublica revealed in December last that Trump Jr killed a rare species of endangered sheep during a hunting trip to Mongolia last summer.
Anti-hunting campaigners Brian Wilson and Al Jardine last week backed a boycott of their former band the Beach Boys, who are booked to perform at the event.
Mr Wilson tweeted against the event that both he and Jardine are "emphatically opposed to".
In a statement, Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, said: “This annual event is the largest meeting in the world of people who celebrate the senseless killing, buying and selling of dead animals for bragging rights.
As our planet suffers an extinction crisis, it is business as usual for the trophy hunting industry and SCI, who continue to revel in spending millions of dollars every year to destroy imperiled wildlife.
SCI hit back at the comments calling it the "height of hypocrisy".
In response to the Humane Society’s statement, SCI CEO W. Laird Hamberlin, said: "It is the height of hypocrisy to call hunting a ‘colonial pastime’ while SCI actively convenes African nations, for example, for a regular and recurring summit on the best methods for wildlife management.
"The Humane Society continually chooses to scold democratically elected leaders from Africa like Botswanan President Masisi for reopening his country to foreign hunters, despite the clear evidence that during the five years when hunting was banned in Botswana, the country saw unprecedented rates of human-wildlife conflict and increased poaching.
"Across Botswana, numerous communities were facing new hardships stemming from a lack of resources that hunting once brought them."
