The age of the pet heraldry

Charlemagne, also known as Karl the Great, was the one to repopularize traditional pet girls such as cat and dog girls in western and later central Europe. While the tradition of noble ponygirl races continued throughout and even thrived in the west, the renewed focus on pet wives led to a new evolution of the pet girl.

Only few sets of faux animal ears and tails in the movable style of ancient Egypt were brought to central Europe by Charlemagne and distributed among his loyal vassals. These sets, a collection containing a multitude of animals and furr colors, soon became important items of legitimacy to these families. They were proof of their station and heritage, showing a direct connection to the first emperor of the frankish empire and what would become the holy roman empire.

As such, it soon became a matter of prestige to own such a set and the distinct looks of them and the pets that wore them became defining features of the noble families that owned them. A small industry of guilds that specialized in servicing and even recreating new sets formed, but the supply remained very limited to only the nobility.

This led to the adoption of the particular animals the ears and tail imitated as well as the furr color to the coat of arms of the noble houses. For example, the house of bourbon's coat of arms became a white lion due to the white lion ears and white tails that the blonde pet wives of their house wore.

The Habsburgs on the other hand had a red cat on their coat of arms. The pet wives of their house wore ginger cat ears and a ginger tail and were generally redheads.

Due to this association of a noble family's legecy to the appearance of their pet girls, noble marriages were rarely between different noble families, unless they had similar coat of arms. Instead, the selection of a wife was made to match their coat of arms appearance as closely as possible. Since branch families often had only minor alterations to their coat of arms, this led to very large networks of branch-families that were all connected to a single main family and frequently intermarried.

This further led to each noble house developing a very particular phenotype, that made them easily distinguishable. The habsburgs for example favored their pets to be ginger, particularly petite and slim. In addition to that, the red hair color came with very pale skin. They soon came to be known derogatively as the 'house cats' of Europe, since their skin was so sensitive to direct sunshine that they rarely wandered outside.

The house of bourbon on the other hand, favored their pet girls to be especially muscular and tall, to best represent the white lion of their coat of arms.

By thirteen hundreds, the noble houses of Europe had mostly adopted this 'pet heraldry' and began the process of phenotypization. However, the epicenter of the trend were the hundreds of tiny polities that composed the holy Roman Empire. Here, each family developed their own 'pet heraldry', leading to particularly distinctive looks.

In the west, the western half of the frankish empire that became the kingdom of France saw a reduced adoption of the trend. Only the high nobility adopted 'pet heraldry', while pony girls remained the main prestige activity of the lower nobility and began to regain popularity among the citizenry of the urban population.