Italy's returning wolves are feasting on an invasive rodent — not the farm animals everyone feared

When wolves spread out of Italy's Apennine Mountains into the farmed Po Plain — rice paddies, maize fields and poplar groves — many people assumed farm animals would be first on the menu. A five-year University of Pavia study says otherwise. Researchers examined 1,078 wolf droppings from mountain and lowland packs and found the diet stayed overwhelmingly wild: livestock never rose above 2.4% of what was eaten. On the plain, the wolves' main course turned out to be the coypu, a large South American rodent that escaped from fur farms, multiplied along the rivers and canals, and damages crops and wetlands. By 2025 the lowlands held breeding wolf packs that had largely raised themselves on an invader nobody wanted.

SDG 15 · Life on land