On the morning of 4 October, on Ilindenska Boulevard in Skopje's Karpoš district, a mare gave birth to a male foal - right on the asphalt, in the middle of traffic. The newborn animal lay on the road with the placenta beside it, its mother standing over it. A photo posted by local resident Igor Panevski spread across social media within hours.

Then activist Biljana Nikolovska appeared on the scene. She was passing along Ilindenska, stopped and pulled the foal onto the grass by the road on her own. On her own - because, as she wrote on Facebook, the other passers-by only stopped to film on their phones. "Nobody would stop and help me. I barely dragged him out of the middle of the road," she wrote.

That's when the longer part of the story began - the one with the institutions. About an hour later Nikolovska went back and saw that the foal was still lying curled up, eyes closed, too weak to stand. She called the veterinary clinic in Avtokomanda. They referred her to the public company Lajka. At Lajka, nobody answered. The number for the Anima Mundi association wasn't working. In the end she managed to reach an employee at the Zoo, after which a team was sent out.

Skopje Mayor Orce Gjorgjievski announced that the mare and foal have been placed in quarantine, where they will receive care and expert treatment, and that the Zoo's teams reacted immediately, even though, as he put it, handling such cases is not within their remit. He called on the Food and Veterinary Agency and the Ministry of Agriculture to urgently organise a coordinated action and establish responsibility for the exploitation and abuse of animals. "I will not allow this to remain just one more news item that will be forgotten by tomorrow," the mayor said.

Let's read the story once more, slowly. The foal was pulled off the road by a private citizen. The Zoo acted outside its remit. The veterinary clinic passed the buck, and at the public company responsible for animals on the street, nobody picked up the phone. The mare's owner is still unknown.

Whose mare gave birth on a boulevard in Karpoš, and how did it end up there? And which number, exactly, is a citizen of the capital supposed to call when they see a newborn animal on the asphalt? The mayor says the story won't be forgotten by tomorrow. That will be tested when the next case like this happens - and when we see whether anyone picks up the phone.