The Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting is today publishing over 500 recently taken photos of British trophy hunters with their kills. It is the single largest cache of photos of trophy hunters from any nation ever publicly released.

The cache reveals the identities of 76 British trophy hunters, many of them previously unknown. It includes photos of British hunters with the bodies of lions, elephants, giraffes, hippos, zebras, monkeys, wildebeest, impalas and small cats that they have shot. The photos are displayed below.

It comes as Parliament prepares to debate a bill on November 25 that would ban imports of hunting trophies from endangered species.

The private member’s bill, being brought by Henry Smith MP (Con, Crawley), has been drafted by the government and has the backing of cross-party MPs as well as Britain’s leading animal welfare and wildlife conservation groups.

British hunters are of all ages ranging from their 20s to people enjoying retirement. They come from all corners of the UK – from Devon in the south to Scotland in the north, and from Norfolk in the east to the island of Anglesey in the west.

Men are hunting with wives and girlfriends, experienced solo female hunters, and parents who have taken their young and teenage sons and daughters with them.

There is a wide mix of professions and classes too - from IT technicians, customer relations managers, gas engineers, farmers, architects, property developers, landscape gardeners, charity fundraisers, and people in the road haulage industry.

The photos are almost all from now-deleted marketing galleries published on the internet by Umlilo Safaris, a company initially launched in the UK and is now registered in South Africa. It is one of the hundreds of such companies currently operating in southern Africa.

The cache includes 540 photos of 76 named British hunters and an additional 89 photos of hunters identified as British but whose names are unknown.

Eduardo Goncalves, founder of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, said: “This is just one of the dozens of companies used by British trophy hunters who go to Africa every year to shoot increasingly endangered animals for fun. It gives us a shocking insight into the scale of the slaughter.

“It also turns on its head the widely-held misconception that trophy hunting is something that just Americans do. British hunters are amongst the world’s leading killers of African elephants and ‘canned’ lions – semi-tame lions bred in captivity and shot in fenced enclosures.

“That’s why the ban needs to happen. Nine out of 10 voters want it brought in immediately.

“The bill coming to Parliament is a very welcome step, but the US-led hunting lobby is doing everything in its power to block the bill including by funding disinformation campaigns.

If people want this barbaric and archaic so-called ‘sport’ consigned to the dustbin of history then they need to contact their MP and tell them that they expect their elected representative to support the bill.”