Image: watson
Just over 1.5 million cattle live in Switzerland. In some communities, they outnumber humans. Here’s where.
It is no exaggeration to say that, without it, Switzerland would not be the same. Our country owes it two of its most popular national symbols, namely cheese and chocolate. The cow is therefore, incontestably, the Swiss animal par excellence.
A little more than 1.5 million cattle lived in Switzerland last year, according to the most recent figures from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), released this Thursday. Their presence is not uniform across the national territory: in Fribourg, Bern, Lucerne and Saint-Gall, we find significantly more of them than in the other cantons.
Escholzmatt-Marbach, in the canton of Lucerne, is the municipality with the largest number of cattle in Switzerland: 7,077 head were counted by the specialized company Identitas at the end of 2024. Val-de-Travers (NE) and Nesslau (SG ) complete the podium, with 6099 and 5622 individuals, respectively.
Sometimes the number of cattle even exceeds that of human inhabitants. This happens in 244 Swiss municipalities, visible in green on the map below:
-The Bernese Jura is particularly affected by this situation: in Seehof (Elay in French), there are more than 700 cattle per 100 inhabitants. In Schelten (la Scheulte) and Rebévelier, this figure rises to 607 and 585, respectively.
In Neuchâtel, Friborg and in the canton of Vaud, there are also localities where there are more cattle than humans. Thus Verrières (320 heads per 100 inhabitants), Châtelard (439) or Mollens (137).
In the cities, however, cows, oxen and bulls are becoming rarer. There are 321 in Zurich, 195 in Lausanne, ten in Basel, while no individuals have been recorded in Geneva. (asi)
