Well, 'she-wolf' meant 'prostitute' in Latin, so there's a link.

Many nationalities consider bitch to mean prostitute (judging from the number of times I heard this from students during my erstwhile TEFLing 'career').

In America, urban low-lifes with whom I interact often use "bitch" as a term for "prostitute." I wonder if the general American culture's use of "bitch" with the meaning of "unpleasant woman" is a recent semantic shift from an older usage that was common to many European languages (Fr "biche"; Port "bicha" are two that spring to mind).

Some lowlifes use "bitch" just to mean any woman. Compare "lady".

But biche and bicha are from bestia, like bête and beast. bitch is good old Anglo-Saxon, with Norse cognates.

'One odd sidelight is that the French apparently think bitch means 'prostitute,' probably because (as Laurent C says in the comments) English "son of a bitch" is equivalent to French "fils de pute."'

As Mark Liberman explains in that same blog posting, "The French wikipedia entry explains the pun like this:

[2] bitch : femme de mauvaise vie

which is not quite right in terms of contemporary usage, where the slang term bitch is mostly used to suggest that a woman is malicious and unpleasant. But as you could guess from the residue in the insulting phrase "son of a bitch", it seems that through the 19th century, the OED's sense 2.a. was retained"

Read the blog post in full for further reference. So it's not that the French think the contemporary meaning of 'bitch' is prostitute, but that it (appearently) was at that time.

I've got Norse cognates too, my mother having been Norwegian-American.