What the view shows
Reading the animals-per-resident ratio by province and region.
This view relates two different sources: animals registered in the BDN (National Livestock Database, as of 31/12/2025) and ISTAT resident population (as of 1 January 2026), both aggregated by province and region. The result is a simple figure, animals per resident, which allows direct comparison of animal and human presence in the same territory, regardless of the geographic size of the province or region. Unlike the map's other views, here the data is shown as a choropleth map, with each province shaded within its real administrative boundary: a higher value corresponds to a more intense shade of the same colour used for the selected species.
The figure is available only at province and region level, not municipality level. At municipality level MapTheFood applies an anonymisation threshold to protect small farmers, masking cells with fewer than 5 farms per municipality and species — a threshold that, applied to an animals-per-resident ratio, would produce gaps concentrated precisely in the smallest municipalities, distorting the comparison rather than clarifying it. At province level this limitation does not apply: the masked residual is still recovered and reattributed to the province it belongs to, so the animal total used in this view is complete, not partial.
Italy records an average of 2.96 animals per resident. The ratio is not evenly distributed: in 56 of the 107 provinces, home to 40.5% of the Italian population, the number of animals exceeds the number of residents. Forlì-Cesena is the province with the highest ratio (33.7 animals per resident, driven mainly by poultry), followed by Verona (26.4) and Rovigo (21.4). Prato, Trieste and La Spezia instead record values below 0.05, equivalent to fewer than one animal per twenty residents. At regional level, Molise has the highest ratio (19.7), followed by Veneto (10.3) and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (6.1).
The animals-per-resident comparison is not a measure of environmental impact and does not replace the emissions, nitrate or land-use data covered in the other views. The ratio allows livestock numbers to be compared with resident population, but provides no information on the geographic destination of products.