In Italy, in recent decades, the wolf population has grown and colonized many areas from which it had previously been absent. In some areas, especially where extensive livestock farming is more widespread, conflict has increased, and the increased frequency of encounters and sightings, even in more heavily populated areas, has fueled social alarm, which has subsequently transformed into political pressure to "do more" and "faster." It is in this context that the species' downlisting, already achieved at the European level, was pushed for and achieved, despite opposition and concerns expressed by a significant portion of the technical and scientific community and despite management tools already available, even under the strict protection regime. 

The "downgraded" wolf, however, has not become a huntable species: it can be managed through the "number control" tool established by Italian law. In practice, removal through culling or capture of individuals must be justified and consistent with the conservation objective required by the European Habitats Directive and Italian legislation. The much-discussed quotas should therefore be understood as the maximum number of possible captures, not as a target to be achieved. Culls can only be carried out to resolve particularly critical situations and only after first adopting alternative methods established by law and verifying that they have not been effective.

What is meant by “downgrading”
"Downgrading" refers to a change in legal status related to Directive 92/43/EEC (Habitats Directive: protection of habitats and species in the EU) and its implementation in Italy through Presidential Decree 357/1997 (the act adopting the Habitats Directive in our country). In practical terms, at the EU level, the wolf is moving from the most stringent protection regime (Annex IV) to a regime that allows for management measures (Annex V). However, constraints remain: population control must be justified, and the species' population must be maintained at a favorable conservation status.

The wolf has not become a huntable species
Even after the downgrading has been implemented, the wolf, pursuant to the Habitats Directive and our implementing decree, remains a protected species. Furthermore, in our country, Law 157/1992 (Regulations on the Protection of Wild Fauna and Hunting) continues to classify the wolf as a "particularly protected species." The wolf is not a huntable species, so it is incorrect to speak of hunting. Controlled hunting will be permitted only if necessary. In practice, barring changes to national law, the bar remains unchanged: even under the new framework, management through culling or capture cannot become a widespread practice, while it remains a justified, documented, and controlled exception, entrusted to authorized personnel and subject to mandatory technical-scientific assessments, specifically Article 157 of the Italian Civil Code. Article 19, which regulates the use of numerical control, requires the opinion of ISPRA (Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research), although not binding, for the control plans that the Regions and Autonomous Provinces may propose.

What changes in practice?
Before the downgrading, under the "strict protection" regime, it was still possible to consider interventions on the species, even up to removal through capture and culling. However, these were exceptional solutions: they had to be carried out in derogation of the prohibitions set out in the law and required authorization from the Ministry of the Environment, on the basis of an opinion from ISPRA. In practice, the procedure required ISPRA to evaluate, for that specific case, the presence of the three conditions required by the Habitats Directive: (1) a valid reason; (2) the demonstrated ineffectiveness of alternative methods that did not involve the removal of individuals; (3) the guarantee that the intervention would not compromise the conservation of the population. Even then, the ISPRA opinion was not "binding" in the strict sense; however, precisely because it represents a technical-scientific evaluation required by the regulatory framework, it is a step that the Administrations will most likely continue to refer to and adhere to.

With the downgrading, the focus has shifted toward the Regions, excluding the Ministry but maintaining a significant role for ISPRA. Each Region/Autonomous Province is responsible for defining the criteria for implementing population control of the species within its territory, through control plans that must always be evaluated by ISPRA. The activity must be initiated for valid reasons and after preventive methods have proven insufficient. The Ministry will no longer have the role of authorizing removals: this will allow management to respond more quickly to real needs.

Abatement quotas: a ceiling, not a target to reach.
Within the current regulatory framework (Law 131/2025, the "Mountain Law"), the Ministry maintains a key and important role: each year, it establishes, through a decree, maximum removal quotas/rates for each Region/Autonomous Province so as not to impact the population's satisfactory conservation status. Quotas should therefore be understood as a limit that must not be exceeded: a tool perhaps more useful for preserving the Italian population within the new framework of greater autonomy for individual Regions, rather than a law legalizing wolf hunting, as erroneously interpreted by some media outlets and, especially, by certain stakeholder groups.

Precisely for this reason, quotas should be read as a conservation "guardrail", not as a removal objective.They are far from the idea of ​​reducing density across the board. Removal may make sense to address specific situations and for limited periods (more or less long), while efforts to develop prevention tools and practices must continue with the goal of achieving more peaceful cohabitation in the long term.

What is defined each year is a percentage of individuals that could be removed. The maximum number, therefore, is tied to the estimate of the current population and implies that management must be accompanied by monitoring of population dynamics and the effects of removals on conservation: how many individuals are there? Have they increased or decreased since the previous survey?

In the absence of updated monitoring data, for this first year of implementation, the maximum culling limit was based on the 2020–2021 national estimate (National Wolf Monitoring) and distributed among the various administrations. The definition of the maximum culling limit stems from a technical-scientific assessment conducted by ISPRA at the request of the Ministry of the Environment, using the only population-scale estimate currently available. ISPRA decided to adopt a precautionary and uniform maximum culling rate of 5% for all regions, resulting in the 160 wolves that can be removed, if necessary, in 2026.

What is a “control plan”
Simply put, it's the "toolbox" with which a Region/Autonomous Province determines how to intervene when the species' impact on humans is severe. The law prioritizes the least impactful measures: removing individuals from the wild can only be a last resort. A control plan should define what is meant by "serious damage," which preventive measures should be implemented first, and under what conditions prevention can be considered ineffective. It must also specify what data is needed to document cases (both the severity of the impact and the ineffectiveness of the measures adopted), who can intervene (authorized and trained personnel), what responsibilities they have, and what information should be collected to assess whether the interventions have actually been effective. In this framework, ISPRA maintains a key technical role in providing opinions on regional control plans.

To date, many Regions/Autonomous Provinces still do not have a ready control plan. In this scenario, it is plausible that, at least in the initial phase, and until Regions and Autonomous Provinces have a ready plan assessed by ISPRA, any interventions will continue to be requested and evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with specific investigations that must be robust and well-documented.

In the absence of a national plan, variability between Regions and Autonomous Provinces can easily become unpredictable and generate further mistrust among Communities and ultimately increase conflict.

When can removal be resorted to?
For now, the removal of one or more wolves remains the last option in a gradual process of managing the species and conflicts with human activities. "Removal" means removing the animal from the wild and can occur by placing the individual in captivity or by culling it.

In cases related to public safety, especially when there is evidence of a high and immediate risk of assault or injury to people, removal can become a measure to be implemented promptly, always based on documented and verifiable criteria.

When the wolf's presence in inhabited areas is no longer an occasional occurrence but becomes repetitive and problematic (steady visits to towns and suburbs, frequent stays near homes), especially if there is a shift toward more familiar behavior (intentional and repeated approaches to people at close range, typically within 30 meters) or if incidents occur that increase risk and conflict, such as predation on dogs or cats near homes or within residential areas. In these cases, the "pyramid" approach remains: first, remove the attractants and eliminate the causes (accessible food, waste, habits that favor the wolf's presence), then implement deterrent measures and, if necessary, more aggressive measures: relocation to a remote area with the adoption of tools that allow for monitoring the individual. If this does not stop the behavior, removal may be considered as a last resort.

Second scenario: damage to livestock. The scope of intervention is reached when the problem is serious and demonstrable and when prevention has been adequately implemented, i.e., with tools recognized as effective and applied correctly.

In ISPRA's proposal, the first step is to annually identify "hot spot" areas, where damage is recurring. This identification is based on national criteria constructed using data collected over approximately a decade and applied to damage events in the most recent two-year period. ISPRA also proposes to consider a sequence of two predations affecting the same farm within a month as "serious," taking into account that, in the aggregate of cases analyzed over a decade and covering the entire national territory, the recurrence of a predation on the same farm was found to be very rare, and sequences with multiple repetitions were found to be even rarer.

In this framework, both the definition of hot spot areas and the occurrence of a first predation at a company can represent useful tools for limiting and directing the efforts of Administrations to improve or introduce the use of prevention.

Taken from EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL FOR THE IDENTIFICATION AND MANAGEMENT OF URBAN AND CONFIDENT WOLVES developed by the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) in collaboration with the Institute of Applied Ecology (IEA), coordinator of the LIFE WILD WOLF project TABLE 2. WOLF BEHAVIOURS ORDERED ACCORDING TO AN INCREASING GRADIENT OF HABITUATION (TO MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT) – CONFIDENCE TOWARDS MAN – POTENTIAL DANGER AND MANAGEMENT SUGGESTIONS.

Why would we need updated data on the species?
Any serious management rests on a simple premise: knowing what you're managing, how many individuals there are, where they are present in the highest densities, and how they are changing over time. This is also true when considering annual harvests that won't impact population conservation. In this phase of regulatory changes, which will presumably also involve population management that includes the introduction of legal harvests, robust monitoring becomes even more crucial, as it makes decisions verifiable and their effects correctable over time.

However, population monitoring is not sufficient. The urgency is perhaps even greater with regard to some variables that impact population dynamics and conservation, such as the prevalence of hybridization (how many of the counted wolves are actually hybrids?) and the extent of various forms of natural and human-caused mortality affecting the population (how many of the counted wolves will die from these causes and should therefore be excluded from the legal harvest quotas?).

Wolf-dog hybridization of anthropogenic origin is not an academic issue: it is a human-induced (not natural) phenomenon that introduces domestic genes into the wild population, with the risk of reducing its adaptation to the environment in which it evolved. Knowing the extent of this component is also crucial from a management perspective: it helps us understand the true size of the pure wild population and therefore correctly assess the sustainability of any legal harvest rates. But there is an even more critical aspect: the presence of hybrids, especially the more recent ones (born from direct crosses between wolves and dogs or from backcrosses of first- and second-generation hybrids with wolves), in itself represents a risk to the conservation of the wild population. The more this component increases, the greater the likelihood of a continued spread of the canine genome within the wolf population. For this reason, management consistent with conservation objectives requires constant monitoring that is not only demographic, but also genetic, with repeated surveys over time to correctly interpret trends and guide any actions.

The second variable is mortality: not just "quantity," but above all, its causes, particularly those of anthropogenic origin (which can be reduced), and how they change over time. Any removal, in fact, adds to existing mortality, which should therefore be known and monitored. Here too, rates and maximum numbers, to be truly sustainable for conservation purposes, should include a monitoring system that updates data, measures effects, and allows for adaptive intervention (adjusting or halting measures when necessary).

Conclusions
In this article, we have attempted to shed light on the regulatory framework for wolves in Italy as of today (mid-February 2026) and what this could mean, concretely, in terms of potential actions regarding the species in our country. It must be noted, however, that the legislative context could still change: the reorganization is ongoing and there's no guarantee it will stop here. Implementation is also evolving: the draft decree on maximum annual rates/quotas is still in the institutional process (State-Regions Conference). 

Precisely for this reason, we wanted to bring order, both to clarify that the change in framework does not in itself automatically pose a threat to wolf conservation—because constraints and protection objectives remain—and to highlight that any credible choice requires, first and foremost, a clear, consistent, and data-based framework: without constant and comparable monitoring, we risk "managing" blindly.

A very practical aspect then emerges: the Regions need resources to make this system truly operational, starting with identifying and training the personnel who would manage any interventions. Alongside this, a decisive investment should be made in informing citizens: raising awareness and promoting behaviors that reduce risks and conflict are essential for sustainable coexistence, regardless of the existence of the removal tool. This also means addressing the main factors that increase the likelihood of their presence near homes or foster intolerable behavior: proper waste and organic waste management, reducing accessible food resources, paying attention to livestock disposal (e.g., placentas, abortions, and fallen stock), and managing conditions that attract carnivores and opportunistic wildlife to residential areas, such as the high availability of easy prey (e.g., wild boar and coypu in urban areas). In short: prevention depends on the local area and habits, not just on the emergency response.

In this context, "management" means more than deciding whether and when to intervene on individual animals. It also means reducing the pressures that increase risk and undermine conservation: poor dog management (vagrant behavior, owner-run dogs, lack of reproductive control), which can fuel hybridization and thus erode the wolf's genetic heritage; and illegal activities, starting with poaching, which must be consistently intercepted and punished. Without this foundational work, any management tool risks becoming a shortcut that fails to address the root causes.

Finally, in our country, it seems essential to foster a secular, non-ideological approach by all—bodies, citizens, and associations—accepting that, in truly critical and well-documented cases (which remain exceptions), measures may be considered that include removing certain individuals from the wild. The law, in fact, mandates that this solution be achieved gradually, depending on the severity of the impact on humans and the lack of effective alternatives: it is not a shortcut, but the last resort within a proportionate and verifiable process. It is a difficult compromise, but necessary, if we truly want to conserve this species and care for it responsibly.

We therefore reiterate the importance of accurate information, capable of sustaining genuine awareness: an essential condition for a more peaceful and responsible coexistence between humans and wolves, without falling into either the "bad" wolf of fairy tales or the idealized wolf of a competing fantasy. Conflicts exist and should not be denied: they must be reduced and made more tolerable, first by preventing the causes that fuel them and, in the few truly critical and well-documented cases, by intervening in a targeted and proportionate manner as a last resort. At the same time, the wolf remains a species of great ecological importance: where it is present, it contributes to maintaining more functional ecosystems and more complete natural dynamics. Therefore, conserving it is not a "luxury" or a symbolic act: it is a duty for all of us. Doing it well today—with data, expertise, prevention, and verifiable choices—means leaving future generations a more intact natural heritage and a more peaceful coexistence, not a problem amplified by shortcuts, illegality, and improvisation.

RULES: Quick map to help you find your way around

European level
Bern Convention (Council of Europe framework): This is the treaty that classifies species into different protection regimes (appendices). For the wolf, the amendment comes into force on March 7, 2025, and involves moving from "strictly protected" (Appendix II) to "protected" (Appendix III).

EU level
Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC: remains the central legal basis for species and habitats in the European Union. The European amendment aligning the wolf regime with the new framework of the Bern Convention occurred with a "targeted" directive (Directive (EU) 2025/1237), adopted in 2025: at the EU level, the wolf moves from the "strictly protected" to the "protected" status, offering greater management flexibility for Member States but still subject to maintaining a favorable conservation status.
Important note: Even with the new status, Member States must ensure the favourable conservation status and can maintain more stringent levels of protection in national legislation.

Useful articles on the Habitats Directive which act as a technical constraint:

• Art. 1: definitions (in particular “state of conservation” and “favourable state of conservation”
• Art. 2: general objective (maintain/restore a favourable conservation status).
• Art. 11: monitoring/surveillance of the state of conservation.
• Art. 14: Possibility of taking and exploiting populations of species listed in Annex V, provided that this is compatible with maintaining them at a favourable conservation status.
• Art. 15: prohibition of non-selective methods that may cause local disappearance or serious disturbances of populations.
• Art. 17: Periodic reporting by Member States based on monitoring results.

National level Presidential Decree 357/1997: this is the act transposing the Habitats Directive into Italian law, with annexes that distinguish the different regimes.
Update: Decree of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security dated 6 November 2025, published in the Official Journal on 21 January 2026, which amends Annexes D and E of Presidential Decree 357/1997 by moving Canis lupus from Annex D to Annex E.

Law 157/1992: clarification is needed here to avoid the misunderstanding "downgrading = hunting." Even with the new EU/national implementation framework, barring any changes to Law 157/92, the wolf remains a "particularly protected species" and is not automatically included in regular hunting.
• Art. 2: particularly protected species (basis for saying “it is not a huntable species”).
• Art. 18: huntable species (serves to clarify, by exclusion, what falls within ordinary hunting).
• Art. 19: introduces the numerical control of wild fauna (“control plans”): an exceptional tool; it is not a hunting activity; it requires justifications, methods, criteria, safety and verification of effects, and requires the opinion of ISPRA.

Where do "control plans", "ISPRA opinions" and "quotas" fit into practice?
Control plan (Article 19 of Law 157/92): a regional/autonomous province document that must specify at least objectives (preferably measurable), area and duration, activation criteria, methods, graduality and selectivity, implementing bodies, safety, impact monitoring, and cessation/correction criteria. ISPRA's technical opinion anchors the plan to a technical-scientific assessment and makes "slogan-based" management more difficult (not impossible, but more difficult).
Annual maximum quotas (mountain decree): since they are established by the Ministry for all Regions/Autonomous Provinces, they presumably remain tied to the population scale; they should be interpreted as upper limits within which removal can be considered, provided certain conditions are met. They are not a target to be achieved and do not apply "automatically": they only make sense if linked to technical justification, priority prevention, graduality, and verification of the effects through monitoring.

Technical-scientific framework (data that affects choices, but is NOT the "norm")
Wolf-dog hybridization: Some recent studies, including Rita Lorenzini's study on wolves found dead in mainland Italy (2020–2024), report a high rate of hybrids, as defined above. This finding stems from the discovery of carcasses, presumably involving individuals "closer" to humans, and it is therefore possible that the result represents an overestimate. The result obtained from the national survey, however, indicated an average hybridization rate of 12%. This was the average value across 13 survey areas distributed across the country. The survey was conducted through feces collection, and the hybridization result presumably represents an underestimate because samples were collected primarily in more natural areas to maximize the likelihood of contact with wolves. These findings inform us today how much further investigation is needed to arrive at a correct assessment of a phenomenon that undoubtedly appears significant, at least in some areas of the country.   

Useful links:

• Bern Convention 
• Directive 92/43/EEC “Habitats” 
• UCN-SSC Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe Statement on the Proposed Downlisting of the Wolf under the Bern Convention and the EU Habitats Directive 
• Open letter from 75 NGOs on wolf protection.
• Law no. 131 of 12 September 2025 (“Provisions for the recognition and promotion of mountain areas” – Official Journal no. 218/2025). 
• MASE Decree of 6 November 2025 (published in the Official Journal of 21 January 2026) on amendments to the annexes of Presidential Decree 357/1997 and classification of the wolf. 
• Law 157/1992 Regulations for the protection of homeothermic wildlife and for hunting 
• ISPRA Experimental protocol for the identification and management of urban and confident wolves 
• ISPRA: National wolf distribution and population estimate for 2020/2021 
• Technical report by the University of Turin (UNITO) Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology (DBIOS) 
• Wolf population in the Italian Alpine regions 2023/2024 
• Wolf (Canis lupus) mortality in Italy between 2019 and 2023 

• The situation of the wolf (Canis lupus) in the European Union: an in-depth analysis

• Genetic evidence reveals widespread wolf-dog hybridization in peninsular Italy: warnings against ineffective management
• France: National Plan on Wolves and Livestock Farming