Anyone seen Mara?

Have you ever heard of mara? Neither had we until we visited Newquay Zoo one freezing day in January last year with our friends Cath and Ronnie. This very unusual creature was wandering around freely - and of course it caught Jon's eye.
A mara is classed as a rodent although it actually looks like it has the body of a small deer and the face of a rabbit with huge brown eyes and long eye-lashes. It has short brown fur, a dark rump and a white belly. Mara originate from the plains and scrubland of Central and Southern Argentina. They are monogamous and usually move around in pairs except in breeding season when they congregate at a communal den dug by the females. The females give birth to 1-3 young after a gestation period of 90 days. Within a day the pups start grazing and wandering a short way from the burrow.They stay around the burrow for about 4 months. The mother returns to nurse them once or twice a day . All the pups will greet a returning mother but she will sniff out her own young and only suckle those. The male mara stands guard and keeps the other pairs at bay. Low grumbles are used to keep contact with members of a pair with whistling calls between mother and young.
Their conservation status is 'lower-risk/near threatened.
We have 6 mara at Lambriggan Court , 3 males and 3 females (we hope!) Recently Jon became aware that one of the mara was being regularly attacked by the others so it had to be removed from the pack. Once isolated it became obvious that something was wrong with the mara. It appeared that it had an extremely large lump to the left of it's spine which made it appear hunched- back. I telephoned the vet in Truro to make an appointment to take the mara in to be checked over. It took a while to explain what a mara was and then the receptionist wouldn't book it in until it had a name. Eventually we agreed to call it 'Mara'.....
Our mara caused quite a stir amongst the staff at the surgery. The vet even telephoned the next day to thank us for bringing it in. She said it made a nice change from cats and dogs!!!
At first the vet thought the 'lump' might be a cyst but after a few whiffs of gas was able to examine the mara more thoroughly and also to do an X-ray. An added bonus was that they were also able to confirm that this mara was indeed a boy! The 'lump' in fact turned out to be a really bad case of congenital curvature of the spine. Being a nurse myself and having seen many X-rays in my work it was certainly the worst case of 'scoliosis' I've ever seen. This curvature was more like a hair-pin bend! The vet reassured us that the mara (or Taz as I have now named him) did not appear to be in pain. It had also been noted that Taz also had lots of little 'nips' on his rump and back so Jon decided to separate him from the others. It does mean that this weekend however will see us running around the paddock like mad-hatters trying to catch Taz's mate so that hopefully by the Summer we shall have lots of baby Tazzes at Lambriggan Court.
N.B - photos of our mara will soon be found on the gallery of our website