The US dentist whose killing of Cecil the lion fuelled a global backlash has emerged for an interview and says he will return to work on Tuesday.
Walter Palmer has disputed some accounts of the hunt, expressed agitation at the animosity directed at those close to him and says he will be back at work within days.
Palmer, who has spent more than a month out of sight after becoming the target of protests and threats, intends to return to his suburban Minneapolis dental practice on Tuesday.
In an interview on Sunday conducted jointly by The Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune that advisers said would be the only one granted, Palmer said again that he believes he acted legally and that he was stunned to find out his hunting party had killed one of Zimbabwe's treasured animals.
"If I had known this lion had a name and was important to the country or a study obviously I wouldn't have taken it," Palmer said.
"Nobody in our hunting party knew before or after the name of this lion."
Cecil was a fixture in the vast Hwange National Park and had been fitted with a GPS collar as part of Oxford University lion research.
Palmer said he shot the big cat with using an arrow from his compound bow outside the park's borders but it didn't die immediately.
He disputed conservationist accounts that the wounded lion wandered for 40 hours and was finished off with a gun, saying it was tracked down the next day and killed with an arrow.
An avid sportsman, Palmer shut off several lines of inquiry about the hunt, including how much he paid for it or others he has undertaken and no videotaping or photographing of the 25-minute interview was allowed.
Some high-level Zimbabwean officials have called for Palmer's extradition, but no formal steps toward getting the dentist to return to Zimbabwe have been publicly disclosed.
Palmer's adviser, Joe Friedberg, a Minneapolis lawyer who said he is acting as Palmer's unpaid consultant, says he has heard nothing from authorities about domestic or international investigations since early August.
After Palmer was named in late July as the hunter who killed Cecil, his Bloomington clinic and Eden Prairie home became protest sites, and animal welfare groups vandalised a vacation property he owns in Florida.
Palmer has been vilified across social media, with some posts suggesting violence against him.
Theo Bronkhorst, a professional hunter who helped Palmer, has been charged with "failure to prevent an illegal hunt".
Honest Ndlovu, whose property is near the park in western Zimbabwe, faces a charge of allowing the lion hunt to occur on his farm without proper authority.
