Cheetah urine on the curtains, a baby rhino knocking you off your chair and the family’s pet hyena trying to eat you are not the problems of a typical North Carolina student athlete, but they are for field hockey player Samantha Travers, a native of Harare, Zimbabwe.
Travers’ family runs an 11,000-acre game preserve, Imire Safari Ranch, where her parents, conservationists John and Judy Travers, breed endangered species, including black rhinoceros. Recently, Animal Planet filmed a show called “There’s a Rhino in My House” featuring the Travers family.
“Coming from Africa is one thing, but coming from the home that I grew up in is another,” Travers said. “By seven o’clock, we’re at the elephant pens dealing with the elephants, maybe I go for an elephant ride… come home for breakfast there’s a warthog, there’s a mongoose on the table.”
Though the endangered rhinos are dehorned, poachers still attack, slaughtering them for what little horn grows back. The Travers adopted an orphaned rhino, Tatenda, whose mother was killed by poachers.
“It’s the kind of thing that you never think will happen to you, so when it did it literally was like losing somebody in your family, my parents were distraught,” Travers said. “We had just lost an entire breeding herd.”
The Travers also adopted two more orphans, a warthog they named Pogs and Tsotsi, a hyena.
Tsotsi became Travers’ parents’ favorite pet, but she and the hyena didn’t get along so well.
Shortly before she came to UNC, Travers took a walk with her parents and Tsotsi attacked her.
Travers’ mother knew something was wrong and immediately told her to take off and run.