The Italian wolf, Canis lupus italicus, is doing better than it was before. In the 1970s there were guessed to be only about 100 wolves surviving in the mountainous parts of Italy. Now there are more like 500 or 600 and they're fanning out into France and Switzerland.
An Italian wolf likes to hunt medium-sized prey like deer, boar, and chamois. If those aren't available, sure, rabbit is fine. And Wikipedia says of the Italian wolf that it has “adapted well in some urbanised areas and as such, will usually not ignore refuse or domestic animals.”
This is clearly accurate, not only because St. Francis of Assisi made a deal with the sheep-killing, man-eating Wolf of Gubbio that it would stop its destructive ways if the townspeople of
Gubbio would give it food instead, but in light of an observation I found in a paper about Italian wolves and foxes in the Abruzzo. The authors were remarking that the foxes seemed to be nervous around wolves. “Uneasy.”
They gave as an example an account of a wolf, a fox, and a cat all eating at a garbage dump outside the village of Caramanico one November day. The cat carefully stayed out of the way of the fox and the wolf. The fox carefully stayed out of the way of the wolf. The wolf, one gathers, strolled calmly wherever it chose, despot of the dump. The fox was jumpy, constantly looking up to see what the wolf was doing. Whenever the wolf moved, the fox rushed over to the place where the wolf had been, to see what it had been eating.
Eventually the wolf, the fox, and presumably even the cat went away, and the researchers inspected the dump, seeking dietary data. They found that all three predators had been eating from a giant heap of discarded spaghetti.
Okay, I like spaghetti, but that is sad. I figure those Italian wolves invading France and Switzerland are young wolves looking for better territories, asking themselves where the vast ancient forests are (the ones full of deer), and grumbling that pasta is good, pasta is great, but you know what? After a while you don't want to eat pasta for every. Single. Meal.