Donald Trump Jr. is on the defense after photo surfaced online of the Celebrity Apprentice judge posing triumphantly with the spoils of his African hunting expedition.

The eldest son of Donald Trump recently traveled with younger brother, Eric Trump, to Zimbabwe, where the siblings hunted elephants, crocodiles, water bucks and other wildlife. The photo evidence, leaked to TMZ, shows Trump clutching the tail of a dead elephant in one hand and a knife in the other, among other PETA-enraging imagery.

Trump -- who can now be seen co-judging the fifth season of NBC's Celebrity Apprentice alongside his famous father and sister, Ivanka Trump -- immediately responded to critics on Twitter.

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"Not a pr move I didn't give the pics but I have no shame about them either. I HUNT & EAT game," he wrote in one post. In another response, he said the meat from the animal carcasses "fed a village for weeks," and that nothing was wasted.

Trump, who is executive vice president of The Trump Organization, has three young children with his model-wife Vanessa Haydon Trump, whom he married in 2005.

His hunting controversy, which has animals lovers up in arms, follows similar incidents involving GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, who ignited outrage last year after uploading a video of him shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who recently updated his status on the social network to announce he'd killed a goat and a pig.