If you know and love wolves, you may want to upload your wolf art at Rubber Stamp Champ and create a wolf rubber stamp to commemorate this beautiful creature.

The wolf has been protected since 1974, and may be coming back to some extent, but if you know the shocking history of this beautiful animal, it may be appropriate indeed to mark your papers and otherwise create wolf impressions with a wolf rubber stamp you can make yourself at Rubber Stamp Champ.

At Rubber Stamp Champ you can upload your art free and make a wolf wood hand stamp in a huge variety of sizes all the way up to 8×10.

Here’s a little history if you love wolves.

Few wild animals have captivated the human imagination like the wolf (Canis lupus), considered to be North America’s dominant carnivore. Other than the great apes, there are few animals that are as similar to humans in terms of their social organization and family structure. The indigenous peoples of the Americas understood this, frequently depicting the wolf in their art and oral histories. Their paintings and stories often displayed wolf and human joined as one powerful creature. In some legends, the wolf is given healing powers, and in others, the wolf saves people from a great flood. Most Native Americans believed in a strong kinship with the wolf and depicted it in a positive light.

For thousands of years, humans and wolves coexisted in this manner. There was a time when, excluding our own species, the wolf was the most widely distributed land mammal in the world. Although we cannot say with certainty, there were at least 250,000, and as many as two million, wolves inhabiting what would become the continental United States. This relationship drastically changed as European colonization began.

Through the systematic, vehement extermination of every wolf to be found, the U.S. won its war against wild nature. Over the course of a few centuries, the wolf population was reduced from the millions to the hundreds, with the last few survivors in the lower 48 states retreating deep into the woods of present-day Michigan and Minnesota for safety.

The fanaticism and scope of the crusade against wolves by the U.S. cannot be overstated. Naturalist writer Barry Lopez asserts that Americans persecuted wolves almost pathologically, and that, “wolf killing goes much beyond predator control…the history of killing wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity.”

Keeping this dark history in perspective, it is truly miraculous that there are any wolves left in the U.S. at all. To be clear, the federal government incentivized the killing of wolves as late at 1965, and many hunters still combed the Great Lakes region for the elusive packs that had taken refuge there. Despite the hunters’ best efforts, the northern timber wolves held their ground and actually began to make a slight comeback. With the cover of a vast, dense forest, and the recolonization of dispersing wolves from Canada, Michigan and Wisconsin’s wolves persevered. By 1970, there were a few reports of wolf sightings farther from the Canadian border than there had been in over a decade. The last of America’s wild wolves were starting to win more public interest and concern, and talk of endangered species conservation and legislation had just begun in the environmentalist movement.