Miska was born with Anton Dolinsek at the Ziga studfarm in Bosnia. She was the first of a new bloodline of the Bosnian Mountain Horse breed. In 2015, she had an accident. Probably, she went through the fences and fell down a mountain. Anton saw she had a problem with one of her hindlegs, and consulted with a number of veterinarians, but nobody was able to definitively diagnose what was going on exactly. She was sound at the walk, but unsound at the trot. In November of 2017, she came to the Netherlands to my yard. In 2019, she started losing a lot of weight and I had her blood drawn. She turned out to have liver- and kidney problems. Medication helped a lot, but winters were hard on her. In 2021, I therefore made the difficult decision to let her go.  

With Miska’s history in mind, we began the dissection. A lot of her damages were well known to us. There was one thing, however, that we did not anticipate. Miska had a so-called ‘broken spleen’. Her spleen had a huge scar, that originated from trauma. This scar tissue was so thin in Miska’s case, that we could look straight through it. A surgeon that was once present at one of our earlier dissections stated that if a human would have a damage of that size, they would most certainly bleed to death. 

Hopefully this case study has inspired you and given you some new insights so that Miska’s story will not be forgotten. The more horses we can study and compare, the more we learn! Would you like access to Miska’s full story? You can find it in the online Equinestudies course ‘The Horse Inside Out’. Here you’ll find images of her life, an assessment of her physical state and unique footage of our findings during the dissection. Click here to go to the webshop.