My input on this one...My family's crest has a boar with an arrow thru it, a shield with St. Andrew's cross, and in the spaces around the cross bars, hunting horns. Rumor has it the family was known as hunters, and the boar was symbolic of a kill that happened on a hunting outing where one of my folk kept a higher class individual from being gored. Dragons, griffons, lions, unicorns and the like seem to be part of the upper classes...One must look to the nature of the animal as well, to gauge it's symbolic attributes.